Exam 14: Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer

You are performing a semi-annual capacity planning exercise for your flagship service. You expect a service user growth rate of 10% month-over-month over the next six months. Your service is fully containerized and runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), using a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard regional cluster on three zones with cluster autoscaler enabled. You currently consume about 30% of your total deployed CPU capacity, and you require resilience against the failure of a zone. You want to ensure that your users experience minimal negative impact as a result of this growth or as a result of zone failure, while avoiding unnecessary costs. How should you prepare to handle the predicted growth?

Your company experiences bugs, outages, and slowness in its production systems. Developers use the production environment for new feature development and bug fixes. Configuration and experiments are done in the production environment, causing outages for users. Testers use the production environment for load testing, which often slows the production systems. You need to redesign the environment to reduce the number of bugs and outages in production and to enable testers to toad test new features. What should you do?

You have a set of applications running on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster, and you are using Stackdriver Kubernetes Engine Monitoring. You are bringing a new containerized application required by your company into production. This application is written by a third party and cannot be modified or reconfigured. The application writes its log information to /var/log/app_messages.log, and you want to send these log entries to Stackdriver Logging. What should you do?

Your organization recently adopted a container-based workflow for application development. Your team develops numerous applications that are deployed continuously through an automated build pipeline to a Kubernetes cluster in the production environment. The security auditor is concerned that developers or operators could circumvent automated testing and push code changes to production without approval. What should you do to enforce approvals?

You need to reduce the cost of virtual machines (VM) for your organization. After reviewing different options, you decide to leverage preemptible VM instances. Which application is suitable for preemptible VMs?

You encountered a major service outage that affected all users of the service for multiple hours. After several hours of incident management, the service returned to normal, and user access was restored. You need to provide an incident summary to relevant stakeholders following the Site Reliability Engineering recommended practices. What should you do first?

You need to deploy a new service to production. The service needs to automatically scale using a Managed Instance Group (MIG) and should be deployed over multiple regions. The service needs a large number of resources for each instance and you need to plan for capacity. What should you do?

You support an e-commerce application that runs on a large Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster deployed on-premises and on Google Cloud Platform. The application consists of microservices that run in containers. You want to identify containers that are using the most CPU and memory. What should you do?

You use Spinnaker to deploy your application and have created a canary deployment stage in the pipeline. Your application has an in-memory cache that loads objects at start time. You want to automate the comparison of the canary version against the production version. How should you configure the canary analysis?

You are managing the production deployment to a set of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. You want to make sure only images which are successfully built by your trusted CI/CD pipeline are deployed to production. What should you do?

Your company follows Site Reliability Engineering practices. You are the person in charge of Communications for a large, ongoing incident affecting your customer-facing applications. There is still no estimated time for a resolution of the outage. You are receiving emails from internal stakeholders who want updates on the outage, as well as emails from customers who want to know what is happening. You want to efficiently provide updates to everyone affected by the outage. What should you do?

You are part of an organization that follows SRE practices and principles. You are taking over the management of a new service from the Development Team, and you conduct a Production Readiness Review (PRR). After the PRR analysis phase, you determine that the service cannot currently meet its Service Level Objectives (SLOs). You want to ensure that the service can meet its SLOs in production. What should you do next?

Your application images are built and pushed to Google Container Registry (GCR). You want to build an automated pipeline that deploys the application when the image is updated while minimizing the development effort. What should you do?

Your team uses Cloud Build for all CI/CD pipelines. You want to use the kubectl builder for Cloud Build to deploy new images to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You need to authenticate to GKE while minimizing development effort. What should you do?

Your application artifacts are being built and deployed via a CI/CD pipeline. You want the CI/CD pipeline to securely access application secrets. You also want to more easily rotate secrets in case of a security breach. What should you do?

You need to run a business-critical workload on a fixed set of Compute Engine instances for several months. The workload is stable with the exact amount of resources allocated to it. You want to lower the costs for this workload without any performance implications. What should you do?

You are running an experiment to see whether your users like a new feature of a web application. Shortly after deploying the feature as a canary release, you receive a spike in the number of 500 errors sent to users, and your monitoring reports show increased latency. You want to quickly minimize the negative impact on users. What should you do first?

Your application services run in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You want to make sure that only images from your centrally-managed Google Container Registry (GCR) image registry in the altostrat-images project can be deployed to the cluster while minimizing development time. What should you do?

You are running an application in a virtual machine (VM) using a custom Debian image. The image has the Stackdriver Logging agent installed. The VM has the cloud-platform scope. The application is logging information via syslog. You want to use Stackdriver Logging in the Google Cloud Platform Console to visualize the logs. You notice that syslog is not showing up in the "All logs" dropdown list of the Logs Viewer. What is the first thing you should do?

Your team has recently deployed an NGINX-based application into Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and has exposed it to the public via an HTTP Google Cloud Load Balancer (GCLB) ingress. You want to scale the deployment of the application's frontend using an appropriate Service Level Indicator (SLI). What should you do?