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Free ACE Practice Questions

10 free, exam-style Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) practice questions with answers and explanations. No signup required. Work through them below, then take the full free ACE practice test to study every exam domain.

The ACE exam has 60 questions and runs 2 hours 0 minutes.

These 10 free ACE questions are organized by exam domain, so you can see how each part of the Associate Cloud Engineer blueprint is tested. Reveal the answer and explanation under each question.

Domain 1: Setting up a cloud solution environment

Question 1

A company grants the 'Compute Admin' role to a group at the folder level. A project owner inside that folder wants to REMOVE that access for their project only, using IAM. What is the result?

  1. The owner can add a deny binding, but only Organization Admins can remove inherited roles
  2. The owner can override the folder role by granting a more restrictive role on the project
  3. The role is inherited and additive, so it cannot be removed at the project level with IAM
  4. The access is removed automatically because project-level policies take precedence
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C - The role is inherited and additive, so it cannot be removed at the project level with IAM

Question 2

A finance manager sets a Cloud Billing budget of $5,000 for a project and configures an alert at 100%. During the month, spending reaches $5,000. What happens?

  1. New resource creation in the project is blocked until the next billing cycle
  2. The project is suspended and must be manually re-enabled by an admin
  3. Billing pauses the project's most expensive services to stay under budget
  4. A notification is sent, but resources continue running and spending continues
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D - A notification is sent, but resources continue running and spending continues

Question 3

An analyst needs to run SQL queries against detailed, itemized Cloud Billing data to build a monthly cost-per-team chargeback report. What should be configured?

  1. Enable Cloud Billing export to BigQuery and query the exported dataset
  2. Grant the analyst the Billing Account Viewer role and use the Reports page
  3. Download monthly invoices as PDFs and import them into a spreadsheet
  4. Use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to model each team's usage
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A - Enable Cloud Billing export to BigQuery and query the exported dataset

Question 4

An organization wants to prevent anyone from creating Compute Engine VMs with external IP addresses across all projects, without relying on each project owner to enforce it. Which mechanism should be used?

  1. A firewall rule denying egress at the organization level
  2. An IAM custom role that omits the compute.instances.create permission
  3. An organization policy constraint applied at the organization node
  4. A billing budget alert that flags projects using external IPs
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C - An organization policy constraint applied at the organization node

Domain 2: Planning and implementing a cloud solution

Question 5

A team runs a nightly batch data-processing job that can safely restart if interrupted. They want the lowest possible compute cost on Compute Engine. Which option best fits?

  1. Spot VMs, since the workload tolerates interruption
  2. A committed use discount on standard on-demand VMs
  3. Regional persistent disks with standard VMs for resilience
  4. Sole-tenant nodes to guarantee dedicated hardware
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A - Spot VMs, since the workload tolerates interruption

Question 6

A startup is deploying a stateless containerized web API. It must scale to zero when idle to minimize cost and requires no management of underlying servers or clusters. Which service is the best fit?

  1. Compute Engine with a managed instance group
  2. Google Kubernetes Engine in Standard mode
  3. App Engine flexible environment
  4. Cloud Run
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D - Cloud Run

Question 7

A company must retain compliance archives for seven years. The data is expected to be accessed at most once per year, and minimizing storage cost is the priority. Which Cloud Storage class should be used?

  1. Nearline Storage
  2. Archive Storage
  3. Standard Storage
  4. Coldline Storage
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B - Archive Storage

Question 8

An application requires a horizontally scalable relational database that provides strong consistency across multiple continents with high availability. Which Google Cloud service is designed for this?

  1. Cloud SQL with cross-region read replicas
  2. Bigtable with a multi-cluster routing policy
  3. Cloud Spanner
  4. Firestore in Native mode
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C - Cloud Spanner

Question 9

Two firewall rules match the same incoming traffic on a VPC network. Rule A is an 'allow' with priority 1000. Rule B is a 'deny' with priority 900. What happens to the traffic?

  1. It is allowed, because allow rules always take precedence over deny rules
  2. It is denied, because rule B has the lower priority number and is evaluated first
  3. It is allowed, because the higher priority number (1000) wins
  4. Both rules are ignored and the implied deny-ingress rule applies
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B - It is denied, because rule B has the lower priority number and is evaluated first

Question 10

A retailer needs to distribute HTTP(S) traffic for a global web application across backends in multiple regions, serving each user from the closest healthy backend. Which load balancer should they choose?

  1. A global external Application Load Balancer
  2. A regional external Application Load Balancer
  3. An internal passthrough Network Load Balancer
  4. A regional internal Application Load Balancer
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A - A global external Application Load Balancer

The rest of the ACE blueprint

The ACE exam also covers these domains. Drill them in the full free practice test:

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