S5 - Storage & Data Processing

Question 1

List the main storage types in GCP.

Answer 1

Object (GCS), Block (PD), File (Filestore), Relational (Cloud SQL / Spanner), Analytical (BigQuery).

Question 2

When to use Nearline vs Coldline?

Answer 2

Nearline for 30–90 day rare access; Coldline for ≥ 90 days archival.

Question 3

What is durability of Cloud Storage?

Answer 3

99.999999999% (11 nines).

Question 4

Difference between Uniform and Fine-grained access?

Answer 4

Uniform = IAM-only; Fine = ACL per object.

Question 5

When to use Filestore?

Answer 5

When VMs or containers need shared POSIX filesystem.

Question 6

Cloud SQL vs Spanner vs BigQuery?

Answer 6

Cloud SQL = regional OLTP; Spanner = global OLTP; BigQuery = serverless OLAP.

Question 7

What tool builds ETL pipelines serverlessly?

Answer 7

Dataflow.

Question 8

What is Pub/Sub used for?

Answer 8

Asynchronous global messaging and ingestion layer.

Question 9

How to protect PII in streaming data?

Answer 9

Use DLP API for detection + masking within Dataflow.

Question 10

How to import PB-scale on-prem data?

Answer 10

Transfer Appliance.

Question 11

Which service moves S3 data to GCS?

Answer 11

Storage Transfer Service.

Question 12

How to ingest SaaS data into BigQuery?

Answer 12

BigQuery Data Transfer Service.

Question 13

What reduces BigQuery query costs?

Answer 13

Partitioning, clustering, compressed formats, and byte limits.

Question 14

When to choose CMEK for storage?

Answer 14

When regulations or audits require customer-managed keys.

Question 15

Exam cue: “Scalable data warehouse with zero ops” → ?

Answer 15

BigQuery.

Question 16

Exam cue: “Global relational transactions” → ?

Answer 16

Spanner.

Question 17

Exam cue: “Shared file system across VMs” → ?

Answer 17

Filestore.

Question 18

Exam cue: “ETL stream processing” → ?

Answer 18

Dataflow + Pub/Sub.

Question 19

Exam cue: “Mask PII in data lake” → ?

Answer 19

DLP API.

Question 20

Exam cue: “Automate archival after 1 year” → ?

Answer 20

Cloud Storage lifecycle policy to Archive class.