Google Associate Cloud Engineer Interview Questions

As more and more companies move to the cloud, there has been a significant increase in the demand for cloud engineers. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leading cloud platforms in the market today, and many companies are adopting GCP to power their businesses. If you’re looking to become a Google Associate Cloud Engineer or are already in the process of preparing for an interview, this blog post will provide you with some helpful tips and sample interview questions.

In this blog post, we’ll cover some of the key areas that you can expect to be tested on during a Google Associate Cloud Engineer interview, including GCP infrastructure, networking, security, and more.

So, whether you’re preparing for an upcoming interview or just want to brush up on your cloud engineering skills, this blog post will provide you with valuable insights and resources to help you succeed.

What is cloud computing and its benefits?

Cloud computing is a model for delivering IT services over the internet, in which remote servers host and manage applications and data. The benefits of cloud computing include:

1. Cost savings: Cloud computing eliminates the need to invest in and maintain expensive on-premises hardware and software, as cloud service providers handle these costs.
2. Scalability: Cloud computing enables organizations to quickly scale up or down their IT resources as needed, without having to invest in additional hardware or software.
3. Accessibility: Cloud computing allows users to access their applications and data from anywhere, using any device with an internet connection.
4. Flexibility: Cloud computing offers a wide range of services, such as computing, storage, and databases, allowing organizations to choose the services that best meet their needs.
5. Disaster recovery: Cloud service providers often have robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, ensuring that data and applications remain available even in the event of an outage or disaster.
6. Security: Cloud service providers typically invest heavily in security measures, such as encryption, access control, and network security, to protect their clients’ data.
7. Collaboration: Cloud computing enables collaboration and sharing of data and applications between different departments, teams, and even organizations, improving efficiency and productivity.

In summary, cloud computing provides organizations with a flexible, cost-effective, and secure way to deliver IT services, without having to invest in and manage their own infrastructure. This allows organizations to focus on their core competencies, rather than IT management, and to respond quickly to changing business needs.

What is the Google Cloud Platform and its services?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Google to support the development and deployment of web and mobile applications. GCP provides a range of services for different use cases, including:

1. Compute: Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google App Engine, and Kubernetes Engine for virtual machine (VM) instances and container orchestration.
2. Storage: Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for object storage and Google Persistent Disk for block storage.
3. Databases: Google Cloud SQL for relational databases and Cloud Bigtable for NoSQL databases.
4. Networking: Google Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud VPN, and Cloud Interconnect for network traffic management and secure data transfer.
5. Machine learning: Google Cloud AI Platform for training and deploying machine learning models, and Google Cloud AutoML for automated machine learning.
6. Analytics: Google BigQuery for data warehousing and analysis, and Google Data Studio for data visualization.
7. IoT: Google Cloud IoT for managing and processing IoT device data.
8. Security: Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) for secure access control, and Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption key management.

GCP provides a comprehensive and integrated suite of services, making it possible to build, deploy, and run applications and services in the cloud, with the benefits of scale, performance, and security. Additionally, GCP integrates with other Google services, such as Google Workspace, Google Maps, and Google Ads, providing additional value to users of those services.

How does Google Cloud Storage differ from other cloud storage options?

Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is a highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage service provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Here are a few ways in which GCS differs from other cloud storage options:

1. Scalability: GCS can store and serve trillions of objects, and can scale to meet the demands of even the largest applications.
2. Performance: GCS provides fast and consistent performance, with low latency and high throughput, even for large objects or datasets.
3. Durability: GCS stores data across multiple locations and automatically replicates data to ensure high durability, with a data durability guarantee of 99.999999999%.
4. Security: GCS implements robust security measures, such as encryption at rest and in transit, and integrates with GCP security tools such as IAM for access control.
5. Integrations: GCS integrates with other GCP services, such as BigQuery, Dataproc, and Cloud Functions, making it easy to store and analyze large datasets in the cloud.
6. Cost: GCS provides a flexible pricing model, with the ability to store data at lower cost than traditional on-premises storage solutions, and the ability to only pay for what is used.

In summary, GCS provides a scalable, durable, secure, and cost-effective object storage solution for storing and serving data in the cloud. Its integration with other GCP services, as well as its robust security and performance features, sets it apart from other cloud storage options.

How do you deploy and manage an application on Google App Engine?

Google App Engine (GAE) is a platform for building and deploying web applications on the Google Cloud Platform. Here is a general outline of the steps to deploy and manage an application on GAE:

1. Create an App Engine application: Log in to the Google Cloud Console and create a new project for your application.
2. Choose a runtime environment: GAE supports several programming languages such as Java, Python, Go, and PHP. Choose the runtime environment that best suits your application.
3. Write and test your application: Write your application and test it locally. Use the App Engine SDK to test the application in a local environment that simulates the App Engine environment.
4. Deploy the application: Use the gcloud command-line tool or the Cloud Console to deploy your application to the GAE environment. You can also use CI/CD tools such as Cloud Build or Jenkins to automate the deployment process.
5. Monitor and manage the application: Use the Cloud Console or the gcloud command-line tool to monitor the health and performance of your application, manage resources, and perform maintenance tasks such as updating the application version or adjusting instance count.
6. Billing and cost management: Monitor and manage your application’s resource usage and cost in the Cloud Console. Set budgets and alerts to stay informed of your costs and usage.

By using GAE, you can focus on writing and deploying your application, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure and its management. GAE provides automatic scaling, high availability, and security features, making it a convenient platform for deploying and managing web applications.

How would you design and implement a fault-tolerant architecture on GCP?

Designing a fault-tolerant architecture on GCP involves building redundancy and failover mechanisms into your infrastructure to ensure that your application or service remains available even when one or more components fail. Here are some steps to take:

1. Identify critical components: The first step is to identify which components of your application or service are most critical and require redundancy to ensure high availability. This may include your database, load balancer, web servers, or other critical components.
2. Implement redundancy: Once you have identified the critical components, you should implement redundancy by deploying multiple instances of these components in different availability zones (AZs) or regions. This can be achieved by using GCP’s load balancing services or by manually deploying instances across multiple zones or regions.
3. Configure failover: In addition to redundancy, you should configure failover mechanisms that can automatically switch traffic to a healthy instance in the event of a failure. This can be achieved by using GCP’s load balancing services, which can monitor the health of instances and automatically route traffic to healthy instances.
4. Monitor and alert: To ensure that your fault-tolerant architecture is working as intended, you should set up monitoring and alerting systems to notify you of any issues or failures. GCP provides a range of monitoring and logging services that can help you track performance and identify issues before they impact your application or service.
5. Test and optimize: Once you have implemented your fault-tolerant architecture, it’s important to test it thoroughly to ensure that it meets your requirements. You should also periodically review and optimize your architecture to ensure that it continues to meet your needs as your application or service evolves.

How does Google Cloud SQL compare to traditional database systems?

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed, relational database service provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that compares to traditional database systems in several ways:

1. Management: Unlike traditional databases that require manual setup and maintenance, Cloud SQL is fully managed, meaning that Google takes care of all the underlying infrastructure, software updates, backups, and other administrative tasks.
2. Scalability: Cloud SQL can easily scale up and down based on the changing demands of your application, with the ability to add or remove CPU and memory resources as needed. This level of scalability is not typically available with traditional databases.
3. High Availability: Cloud SQL provides high availability by replicating data across multiple zones, providing automatic failover and ensuring that your data is always available.
4. Security: Cloud SQL implements robust security measures such as encryption at rest and in transit, as well as integration with GCP security tools such as IAM for access control.
5. Cost: Cloud SQL pricing is based on usage, so you only pay for what you use. In contrast, traditional databases often require a large upfront investment in hardware and software, and ongoing maintenance costs.

Overall, Cloud SQL provides many benefits over traditional database systems, including ease of use, scalability, high availability, and security, all while providing cost savings over traditional on-premises database solutions.

What is the role of Google Compute Engine in cloud computing?

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is a part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and provides scalable, on-demand, virtual machines (VMs) for running applications and services. The role of GCE in cloud computing is to provide an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution for customers who need to run their applications on virtual servers in the cloud.

GCE provides the following key features:

1. Easy creation and management of VMs with various configurations (CPU, memory, disk, etc.)
2. Integration with other GCP services, such as Google Cloud Storage and Google Kubernetes Engine
3. Load balancing and auto-scaling options for VM instances to handle traffic spikes
4. Predefined images for popular operating systems and pre-installed software for quick deployment
5. Flexible pricing options, with the ability to only pay for what is used.

By using GCE, customers can focus on their applications and services, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure and its management. GCE provides a secure, highly available and scalable cloud computing platform for running workloads in the cloud.

How does Google Cloud Load Balancing work?

Google Cloud Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic to multiple backend services such as virtual machines, containers or network endpoints, based on traffic demand. It helps to balance network traffic, increase reliability and improve performance by automatically managing and routing incoming requests to the most available and suitable backend instances.

Google Cloud Load Balancing offers several types of load balancing services:

1. Network Load Balancer: for high-performance, low-latency and TCP/UDP-based traffic
2. HTTP(S) Load Balancer: for HTTP/HTTPS traffic
3. TCP Load Balancer: for raw TCP traffic
4. SSL Proxy Load Balancer: for HTTPS traffic with SSL/TLS decryption at the load balancer

It uses various load balancing algorithms, such as round-robin and least connections, to determine how to distribute traffic to the backend instances. Health checks are also performed to determine the availability of backend instances and redirect traffic accordingly.

What are the different ways to secure Google Cloud data and services?

1. Encryption (at rest and in transit)
2. Access controls (IAM policies)
3. Network security (VPCs, firewall rules)
4. Key management (Cloud KMS)
5. Audit logging and monitoring (Stackdriver)
6. Virtual private cloud (VPC) networking
7. Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)
8. Private access options
9. Shielded VMs
10. Binary Authorization.

How does Google Cloud Monitoring help to monitor the performance and availability of applications?

Google Cloud Monitoring is a service that helps to monitor the performance and availability of applications running on the Google Cloud Platform. It provides real-time visibility into resource utilization, performance metrics, and other critical information. With Google Cloud Monitoring, you can:

1. Collect and store metrics, logs, and traces from your applications.
2. Create custom dashboards and alerts to monitor key performance indicators and receive notifications when there is an issue.
3. Analyze performance trends over time and identify correlations between different metrics to help diagnose problems.
4. Integrate with other Google Cloud Platform services, such as Stackdriver Trace and Stackdriver Logging, to provide a complete picture of the health of your application.
5. Use pre-configured monitoring dashboards and alerting policies for popular Google Cloud services like Compute Engine and App Engine.

By using Google Cloud Monitoring, you can ensure the performance and availability of your applications and quickly resolve any issues that arise.

Can you explain the process of migrating an on-premise application to the Google Cloud Platform?

Yes. The process of migrating an on-premise application to the Google Cloud Platform typically involves the following steps:

1. Assessment: Analyze the current infrastructure and application to determine the resources required and identify any dependencies.
2. Planning: Create a detailed migration plan that takes into account the resources required, budget, timeline, and any potential risks.
3. Preparation: Prepare the application for migration by making any necessary changes to the code and configuration.
4. Data Migration: Transfer data from the on-premise system to the Google Cloud Platform. This could involve migrating databases, files, and other data sources.
5. Deployment: Deploy the application on the Google Cloud Platform, using services like Compute Engine, App Engine, or Kubernetes Engine.
6. Testing: Test the application in the cloud environment to ensure it is functioning as expected.
7. Go-Live: Perform the final migration and transition to the Google Cloud Platform.
8. Optimization: Continuously monitor and optimize the performance of the application on the cloud platform.

What are the best practices for securing resources in GCP?

Securing resources in GCP is a critical aspect of building a successful cloud architecture. Here are some best practices for securing resources in GCP:

1. Use Identity and Access Management (IAM): IAM is a GCP service that enables you to manage access to your cloud resources by creating and managing roles and permissions for users and service accounts. By following the principle of least privilege, you can restrict access to your resources and prevent unauthorized access.
2. Use network security: GCP provides a range of network security features such as firewall rules, VPC service controls, and private networking that can help you secure your resources. By creating firewall rules to restrict access to your resources and configuring VPC service controls, you can reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
3. Use encryption: GCP provides various encryption options that you can use to encrypt data at rest and in transit. By using encryption, you can protect your data from unauthorized access, even if it falls into the wrong hands.
4. Implement monitoring and logging: Monitoring and logging are crucial for detecting and responding to security threats in your environment. GCP provides various monitoring and logging services such as Stackdriver Logging, Cloud Audit Logs, and Cloud Security Command Center that can help you detect and respond to security threats.
5. Keep your software up-to-date: Keeping your software up-to-date is essential to ensure that your environment is secure. GCP provides automatic updates for its services and offers a range of tools to manage updates for your software and applications.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand, pay-as-you-go distribution of IT services over the Internet. Instead of purchasing, operating, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, you can rent computing power, storage, and databases from a cloud provider like Google on an as-needed basis. The cloud computing service is genuinely worldwide, with no regional or border limits.

What is Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud Platform is a Google-developed cloud platform that allows users to access cloud systems and computer services. GCP provides a wide range of cloud computing services in the compute, database, storage, migration, and networking sectors. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a set of cloud computing services that run on the same infrastructure as Google’s end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, file storage, and YouTube.

What types of tools are available via the Google Cloud Platform?

• Firstly, Compute.
• Secondly, Networking.
• Thirdly, Storage and Databases.
• Fourthly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML)
• Fifthly, Big Data.
• Sixthly, Identity and Security.
• Lastly, Management Tools

What is Google Associate Cloud Engineer?

An Associate Cloud Engineer deploys applications, monitors operations of multiple projects, and maintains enterprise solutions to ensure that they meet target performance metrics. This individual has working experience with public clouds and on-premises solutions. They can utilise the Google Cloud Console and the command-line interface to perform typical platform-based operations in order to maintain one or more deployed solutions on Google Cloud that use Google-managed or self-managed services.

How to create a new Clouding Project?

• Firstly, If you’re new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how the products perform in real-world scenarios.
• Secondly, In the Google Cloud Console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.
• Thirdly, Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project.
• Fourthly, Enable the Cloud Build API.
• Fifthly, Install and initialize the Cloud SDK.
• Also, create an App Engine application for your Cloud project in the Google Cloud Console.
• Lastly, select a region where you want your app’s computing resources located.

What are the three types of roles in IAM?

There are three types of roles in IAM:

• Basic roles: It includes the Owner, Editor, and Viewer roles that existed prior to the introduction of IAM.
• Predefined roles: It provides granular access for a specific service and is managed by Google Cloud.
• Custom roles: It provides granular access according to a user-specified list of permissions.

What is the full form of MFA?

The MFA stands for Multi-factor authentication.

What is the use of MFA?

MFA helps you protect your user accounts and company data with a wide variety of MFA verification methods such as push notifications, Google Authenticator, phishing-resistant Titan Security Keys, and using your Android or iOS device as a security key.

What is the full form of SSO and what is it used for?

The SSO stands for Single sign-on. The SSO enable employees to work from virtually anywhere, on any device, with single sign-on to thousands of pre-integrated apps, both in the cloud and on-premises.

What do you mean by Cloud monitoring?

Cloud Monitoring gathers data from Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), hosted uptime probes, and application instrumentation to create metrics, events, and metadata. You can also get this information from over 150 different application components, on-premise systems, and hybrid cloud systems.

What is the use of Cloud Billing accounts? 

• Cloud Billing accounts pay for Google Cloud projects and Google Maps Platform projects.
• A project and its service-level resources are always paid for by a single Cloud Billing account.
• Project usage is tracked and charged to the linked Cloud Billing account.
• A Cloud Billing account operates in a single currency and is linked to a Google payments profile.
• A Cloud Billing account can be linked to one or more projects.

How can you manage your Cloud billing accounts?

You can manage your Cloud Billing accounts using the Google Cloud Console.

How Cloud Billing budgets help its users?

• Users can define the scope of the budget.
• Users can set the budget amount to a total that you specify, or base the budget amount on the previous month’s spend.
• You can set threshold rules to trigger email alert notifications.
• You can also use Pub/Sub for programmatic notifications.

What do you know about Google Compute Engine?

Google Compute Engine is a software-as-a-service offering that provides self-managed and configurable virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure. It contains virtual machines based on Windows and Linux that can run on local, KVM, and durable storage. Furthermore, Google Compute Engine connects with other Google Cloud Platform technologies such as Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google BigQuery to expand its computing capabilities.

What is Cloud Storage?

Cloud storage makes use of enormous computer servers housed in data centres that physically store data and make it accessible to customers via the internet. Furthermore, a hosting business often owns and manages the physical environment, which spans several servers.

What do you understand by Cloud SDK?

The Cloud SDK manages Compute Engine networks, firewalls, and disk storage with the gcloud command-line tool. It is used to manage applications and resources that are hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. It is composed of the gsutil, gcloud, and command line tools. The google cloudtool is automatically downloaded with the Cloud SDK.

What are the benefits of using Cloud SQL?

• Firstly, Reduce maintenance costs with fully managed relational databases in the cloud.
• Secondly, ensure business continuity by utilizing dependable and secure services that are backed by a 24/7 SRE team.
• Then, automate database provisioning, storage capacity management, and other labor-intensive processes.
• Furthermore, Cloud SQL Insights makes database observability simple for developers.
• Lastly, GKE and BigQuery are easy to integrate with current apps and Google Cloud services.

What are the key features of Cloud CDN?

• Global distribution with anycast IP
• Optimized for last-mile performance
• Integrated with Google Cloud

What is Cloud Load Balancing?

User traffic is distributed among many instances of your apps using a load balancer. Load balancing decreases the possibility of performance difficulties in your applications by distributing the load.

Give some Cloud balancing features provided by Google Cloud?

• Single IP address to serve as the frontend
• Automatic intelligent autoscaling of your backends
• External load balancing for when your users reach your applications from the internet
• Internal load balancing for when your clients are inside of Google Cloud
• Regional load balancing for when your applications are available in a single region
• Global load balancing for when your applications are available across the world

What is the full form of DNS?

The DNS stands for Domain Name System.

What is Cloud DNS?

The Domain Name System, or DNS, is one of the Internet’s most fundamental services, converting domain names into IP addresses. Often handled by an organization’s professional network engineers. DNS is crucial, especially in a cloud context, as DNS is required to make your applications available to enterprise users.

What does Regional MIGs offers?

Since the instances in a regional MIG are scattered throughout numerous zones in a single area, they provide higher availability than zonal MIGs. Auto healing, load balancing, autoscaling, auto-updating, and stateful workloads are all supported by MIGs.

What do you know about GKE?

GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) is a controlled environment for deploying, maintaining, and scaling containerized applications on Google infrastructure. It is made up of several machines, primarily Compute Engine instances, that have been brought together to form a cluster.

What do you understand by Events?

Events are things that happen within your cloud environment that you might want to take action on. These might be changes to data in a database, files added to a storage system, or a new virtual machine instance being created.

What do you understand by Triggers?

Creating a response to an event is done with a trigger. A trigger is a declaration that you are interested in a certain event or set of events. Binding a function to a trigger allows you to capture and act on events.

What is the role of Google Cloud Deployment Manager?

Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service for Google Cloud services that simplifies their development and maintenance. Create installations with a range of Google Cloud services set to work together, such as Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Cloud SQL, by writing flexible template and configuration files.

What do you understand by Google cloud marketplace?

Google Cloud Marketplace offers ready-to-go solutions that launch quickly to Google Cloud and other environments with Anthos. Enterprise procurement teams can buy and fulfill quickly so they can strategically partner with IT during development.

What is the use of Cloud Shell?

Cloud Shell provides you with command-line access to cloud resources directly from your browser. Easily manage projects and resources without having to install the Cloud SDK or other tools on your system. With Cloud Shell, the Cloud SDK gcloud command and other utilities are always available, up to date, and fully authenticated.

What is Google BigQuery? What are the benefits of BigQuery for the data warehouse practitioners?

Google BigQuery is a software solution that replaces the typical data warehouse’s hardware infrastructure. It is employed as a data warehouse and hence serves as a central repository for all of an organization’s analytical data. In addition, BigQuery divides the data table into components called as datasets.