Free Practice Questions for Google Professional-Cloud-DevOps-Engineer Exam

Cloud Build Private Pools allow your builds to run in a secure, isolated environment with direct access to resources inside your private VPC network, without exposing them to the public internet. This is the Google-recommended approach for minimizing management overhead while maintaining strong security boundaries.

From the official documentation:

"Private pools run your builds in a dedicated and secure environment that can connect to private network resources."

— Cloud Build Private Pools Overview

"You can configure private pools to access resources in a VPC network, which enables secure access to services without using public IPs."

— Accessing Private Resources

This method eliminates the need to create and manage additional compute instances or complex load balancing setups, providing seamless integration with your private services during CI pipeline execution.

The keywords here is "developers or operators". Option A the operators could push images to production without approval (operators could touch the cluster directly and the cluster cannot do any action against them). Rest same as francisco_guerra.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/access/service-accounts#associating_a_service_account_to_an_instance

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From General Google Cloud IAM and Organization Policy Knowledge:

The core requirement is to prevent accidental deletion of a Shared VPC host project, even by project owners, by ensuring that only users with a specific permission at the organization level can remove the lien that protects the project.

A lien (resourcemanager.projects.delete) has already been placed on the project. This prevents its deletion. The challenge is to prevent the removal of this lien by project-level administrators.

The permission to remove a lien is resourcemanager.projectLiens.update (or resourcemanager.projects.updateLiens as stated in the question, which implies a broader update capability including liens).

Option A (Enable VPC Service Controls for the container.googleapis.com API service): VPC Service Controls are for data exfiltration prevention by creating service perimeters. They do not directly control IAM permissions for lien management or project deletion.

Option B (Revoke the resourcemanager.projects.updateLiens permission from all users associated with the project): While this would prevent project-level users from removing the lien, it doesn't enforce therequirement that only users with this permission at the organization level can remove it. A project owner could potentially re-grant themselves this permission at the project level if not otherwise restricted. The goal is a stronger, centrally enforced restriction.

Option C (Enable the compute.restrictXpnProjectLienRemoval organization policy constraint): This is specifically designed for the scenario described.Organization Policies allow centralized control over resource configurations across the organization.

The compute.restrictXpnProjectLienRemoval constraint, when enforced (set to True), restricts the removal of liens on Shared VPC host projects. Only users who have the resourcemanager.projectLiens.update permission (or resourcemanager.projects.updateLiens) granted at the organization level can then remove such liens. This prevents project owners or other project-level principals from removing the lien unless they also have this specific permission at the org level.

Option D (Instruct teams to only perform IAM permission management as code with Terraform): While Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a good practice for managing IAM, it's an operational guideline and doesn't technically enforce the restriction on lien removal. A user with sufficient project-level IAM permissions could still manually remove the lien via the console or gcloud if not prevented by an organization policy.

Therefore, enabling the compute.restrictXpnProjectLienRemoval organization policy is the direct and most effective way to meet the requirement.

Reference (Based on Google Cloud Organization Policy and Shared VPC documentation):

Google Cloud documentation on Resource Manager Liens: https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/project-liens

Google Cloud documentation on Organization Policy Constraints: https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/organization-policy/org-policy-constraints

Specifically, the compute.restrictXpnProjectLienRemoval constraint: "When set to true, liens on Shared VPC host projects can only be removed by users that have resourcemanager.projectLiens.update permission on the organization." (or similar wording indicating org-level permission is required). This constraint ensures that the protection afforded by the lien on a critical Shared VPC host project cannot be easily circumvented at the project level.

The correct answer is B. Apply the constraints/iam.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation constraint to the organization.

According to the Google Cloud documentation, the constraints/iam.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation constraint is an organization policy constraint that prevents the creation of user-managed service account keys1.User-managed service account keys are long-lived credentials that can be downloaded as JSON or P12 files and used to authenticate as a service account2.These keys pose severe security risks if they are leaked, stolen, or misused by unauthorized entities34.By applying this constraint to the organization, you can completely eliminate the risks associated with the use of JSON service account keys and enforce a more secure alternative for authentication, such as Workload Identity or short-lived access tokens12. This also minimizes operational overhead by avoiding the need to manage, rotate, or revoke user-managed service account keys.

The other options are incorrect because they do not completely eliminate the risks associated with the use of JSON service account keys. Option A is incorrect because it only restricts the IAM permissions to create, list, get, delete, or sign service account keys, but it does not prevent existing keys from being used or leaked. Option C is incorrect because it only disables the upload of user-managed service account keys, but it does not prevent the creation or download of such keys. Option D is incorrect because it only limits the IAM role that can create and manage service account keys, but it does not prevent the keys from being distributed or exposed to unauthorized entities.

The best option for deploying a new version of your containerized application to production on GKE and ensuring that the application does not have performance problems after deployment is to deploy the application through a continuous delivery pipeline by using canary deployments, use Cloud Monitoring to look for performance issues, and ramp up traffic as supported by the metrics. A canary deployment is a deployment strategy that involves releasing a new version of an application to a subset of users or servers and monitoring its performance and reliability. This way, you can test the new version in the production environment with real traffic and load, and gradually increase the traffic as the metrics indicate. You can use Cloud Monitoring to collect and analyze metrics from your application and GKE cluster, such as latency, error rate, CPU utilization, and memory usage. You can also use Cloud Monitoring to set up alerts and dashboards to track the performance of your application.

The best option for implementing a scalable solution to support global Prometheus querying and minimize management overhead is to use Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed service that allows you to collect, query, and visualize metrics from your GKE clusters using Prometheus-based tooling. You can use Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to query metrics across multiple clusters and regions using a global view. You can also use Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to integrate with other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and BigQuery. By using Google Cloud ManagedService for Prometheus, you can avoid managing and scaling your own Prometheus servers and focus on your application performance.

The best option for selecting a deployment and testing strategy that meets your requirements is to use blue/green deployment and canary testing. A blue/green deployment is a deployment strategy that involves creating two identical environments, one running the current version of the application (blue) and one running the new version of the application (green). The traffic is switched from blue to green after testing the new version, and if any issues are discovered, the traffic can be switched back to blue instantly. This way, you can reduce the complexity of release deployments and minimize the duration of deployment rollbacks. A canary testing is a testing strategy that involves releasing a new version of an application to a subset of users or servers and monitoring its performance and reliability. This way, you can test real production traffic with a gradual increase in the number of affected users.

The best option for creating the development and production environments for each team while minimizing costs and ensuring isolation is to create a development and a production GKE cluster in separate projects, in each cluster create a Kubernetes namespace per team, and then configure Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) so that each team can only access its own namespace. This option allows you to use fewer clusters and projects than creating one project or cluster per team, which reduces costs and complexity. It also allows you to isolate each team’s environment by using namespaces and RBAC, which prevents teams from accessing other teams’ environments.