Google Associate-Cloud-Engineer - Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer

as gcloud config configurations list can help check for the existing configurations and activate can help switch to the configuration.

gcloud config configurations list  lists existing named configurations

gcloud config configurations activate  activates an existing named configuration

Obtains access credentials for your user account via a web-based authorization flow. When this command completes successfully, it sets the active account in the current configuration to the account specified. If no configuration exists, it creates a configuration named default.

Change your default zone and region in the metadata server Note: This only applies to the default configuration. You can change the default zone and region in your metadata server by making a request to the metadata server. For example: gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \ --metadata google-compute-default-region=europe-west1,google-compute-default-zone=europe-west1-b The gcloud command-line tool only picks up on new default zone and region changes after you rerun the gcloud init command. After updating your default metadata, run gcloud init to reinitialize your default configuration.https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gcloud-compute#change_your_default_zone_and_region_in_the_metadata_server

The best practice is to use Organization Policies to enforce constraints across the organization and IAM Groups for granting resource access to minimize operational cost and administrative overhead.

Blocking non-company-issued emails: The Organization Policy Service with the constraint domains/restrictIdentityPropagation (or similar constraints like constraints/iam.allowedPolicyMemberDomains) is the Google-recommended, automated way to ensure that only specified domains (your company's domain) can be used as identities in IAM policies, thus blocking non-company issued emails and eliminating manual checks.

Department-specific access: Access should be granted using IAM roles assigned to Google Groups that represent the departments. This adheres to the principle of least privilege and simplifies management (you only manage group membership, not individual users' IAM bindings).

Minimizing operational costs/overhead: Using IAM with Google Groups and Organization Policies is the native, lowest-overhead, and most scalable solution on Google Cloud. Option D's manual checks are high-overhead and not recommended.

The goal is to create a serverless, scalable, and asynchronous transaction processing system with minimal management overhead.

Serverless Requirement:Options involving installing Kafka on VMs (A, B) or using VM instances for processing (B, C) introduce management overhead associated with VMs (patching, scaling configuration, OS management) and Kafka cluster management, violating the serverless and minimal management criteria.

Asynchronous Requirement:Both Kafka and Pub/Sub can handle asynchronous messaging. However, Pub/Sub is Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless messaging service, inherently minimizing management overhead compared to self-managed Kafka on VMs.

Scalability and Processing:Cloud Run is a fully managed, serverless platform that automatically scales based on traffic, suitable for processing transactions without managing underlying infrastructure. VM instances require manual scaling configuration or managed instance groups, adding overhead.

Combining Pub/Sub for asynchronous message ingestion (fully managed, serverless) and Cloud Run for processing (fully managed, serverless, scalable) directly meets all requirements: serverless, scalable, asynchronous, and minimal management overhead. Option D is the only one that uses fully serverless components for both ingestion and processing.

This solution leverages the native, fully-managed Google Cloud services for cost monitoring, which minimizes engineering costs and follows best practices.

Threshold Notifications: The native Cloud Billing Budgets feature (as referenced in Question 14) is used to set up automated alerts when spend reaches certain thresholds.

Detailed Insights/Dashboards: The most scalable and cost-effective way to provide detailed billing data for analysis, custom queries, and custom dashboards is to use Cloud Billing Export to BigQuery. BigQuery can handle massive amounts of data and allows teams to query the data and use BI tools (like Google Looker Studio, which is often used with BigQuery) to create their own dashboards.

Cost/Overhead Minimization: Options A, B, and C introduce custom scripts (B) or external/self-managed tools like Grafana on Compute Engine (A and C), which directly contradict the goal of minimizing engineering costs. Using BigQuery Export is the fully managed, recommended data solution.

Storage Admin (roles/storage.admin) Grants full control of buckets and objects.

When applied to an individual bucket, control applies only to the specified bucket and objects within the bucket.

firebase.projects.get

resourcemanager.projects.get

resourcemanager.projects.list

storage.buckets.*

storage.objects.*

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/access-control/iam-roles

This role grants full control of buckets and objects. When applied to an individual bucket, control applies only to the specified bucket and objects within the bucket.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-roles#storage-roles

https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/configuration/create-basic-configuration

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/best-practices-for-using-and-managing-service-accounts

If an application uses third-party or custom identities and needs to access a resource, such as a BigQuery dataset or a Cloud Storage bucket, it must perform a transition between principals. Because Google Cloud APIs don't recognize third-party or custom identities, the application can't propagate the end-user's identity to BigQuery or Cloud Storage. Instead, the application has to perform the access by using a different Google identity.