Cloud Engineer Cloud Engineer Cost Optimization & Resource Management 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Compute Engine pricing model offers the deepest discounts (up to 70% off on-demand) in exchange for a firm 1-year or 3-year commitment?
- Spot VMs
- Sustained Use Discounts (SUD)
- Committed Use Discounts (CUD) (Correct answer)
- Preemptible VMs
Correct answer: Committed Use Discounts (CUD)
Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) offer up to 70% off on-demand prices for a 1- or 3-year commitment to a specific machine type or resource, providing the highest discount tier.
Question 2: What happens to a Spot VM when Compute Engine needs the capacity back?
- It is migrated to another zone automatically
- It is stopped or preempted with a 30-second warning (Correct answer)
- It is converted to a standard VM at on-demand pricing
- It continues running but at a higher price
Correct answer: It is stopped or preempted with a 30-second warning
Spot VMs (formerly Preemptible VMs) can be preempted by Google at any time with a 30-second shutdown notice when Compute Engine needs the capacity for other workloads.
Question 3: Which GCP tool provides budget alerts and can automatically cap spending by disabling billing on a project?
- Cloud Monitoring dashboards
- Cloud Billing budgets and alerts (Correct answer)
- Cost table in the Billing console
- Recommender API
Correct answer: Cloud Billing budgets and alerts
Cloud Billing budgets let you set a spending threshold and configure email alerts or Pub/Sub notifications; a billing account can also be programmatically disabled at threshold.
Question 4: A Compute Engine VM runs continuously for a full month. What automatic discount is applied without any commitment required?
- Committed Use Discount
- Spot VM discount
- Sustained Use Discount (SUD) (Correct answer)
- Free tier credit
Correct answer: Sustained Use Discount (SUD)
Sustained Use Discounts are automatic discounts of up to 30% applied to VMs that run for a significant portion of the billing month (no commitment required).
Question 5: Which GCP service provides rightsizing recommendations by analyzing VM CPU and memory utilization data?
- Cloud Billing reports
- Google Cloud Recommender (Correct answer)
- Cloud Monitoring alerting
- Cost Management console
Correct answer: Google Cloud Recommender
Google Cloud Recommender analyzes resource usage patterns and suggests cost-saving actions like rightsizing oversized VMs or removing idle resources.
Question 6: What Cloud Storage feature can automatically move objects to cheaper storage classes (e.g., Nearline, Coldline) after a set number of days?
- Versioning policy
- Object Lifecycle Management (Correct answer)
- Retention policy
- Storage Transfer Service
Correct answer: Object Lifecycle Management
Object Lifecycle Management rules in Cloud Storage automatically transition objects to lower-cost storage classes or delete them based on age or other conditions.
Cloud Engineer Cloud Engineer Cost Optimization & Resource Management 1
Which Compute Engine pricing model offers the deepest discounts (up to 70% off on-demand) in exchange for a firm 1-year or 3-year commitment?