GCP Core Services and Architecture Basics Questions

Core Google Cloud Platform services and architecture concepts, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine (GKE), App Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL/Spanner, and IAM. Covers foundational cloud architecture topics such as projects and resource organization, VPC networking (regions, zones, subnets), identity and access management, security considerations, and scalable design patterns for cloud-native applications on GCP.

EasyTechnical

77 practiced

How would you explain GKE to a customer and summarize the differences between GKE Standard and GKE Autopilot? Cover responsibility model, cost implications, operational overhead, and ideal use-cases where Autopilot is a good fit and where Standard is preferable.

EasyTechnical

65 practiced

A customer needs two storage use-cases: long-term encrypted backups and hosting CDN-backed static website assets. For each use-case, recommend Cloud Storage class (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive), bucket location type (multi-region vs regional), ACL/uniform access and lifecycle rules. Explain reasoning in terms of access patterns, retrieval cost, durability, and compliance.

EasyTechnical

71 practiced

Explain when you would recommend Cloud SQL versus Cloud Spanner for enterprise customers. Cover scale, consistency guarantees, schema and SQL compatibility, operational overhead, cost characteristics, and migration complexity. Provide two short example customer profiles — one suited to Cloud SQL and one to Spanner.

EasyTechnical

67 practiced

Explain BigQuery's separation of storage and compute, how query pricing works (on-demand vs flat-rate), and practical strategies for designing tables (partitioning and clustering) to improve performance and reduce cost for analytical workloads. How would you explain this to a data team evaluating BigQuery for the first time?

HardSystem Design

87 practiced

A customer operates 2000 VMs across 10 datacenters and asks for a comprehensive migration strategy to GCP with minimal downtime. As a Sales Engineer, outline discovery/assessment steps, networking and connectivity choices, recommended migration tools (with pros/cons), cutover approaches, security implications, cost estimation approach, and a POC plan that demonstrates low-risk migration for a subset of applications.

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