About the Exam

Associate Cloud Engineer is a Google Cloud certification for people who deploy and secure applications, services, and infrastructure, monitor operations across projects, and maintain enterprise solutions on Google Cloud. The exam covers setting up a cloud solution environment, planning and implementing a cloud solution, ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution, and configuring access and security. Passing demonstrates you can perform common Google Cloud platform tasks at the associate level and support deployed solutions.

Exam Topics

  • Setting up a cloud solution environment20%
  • Planning and configuring a cloud solution17%
  • Deploying and implementing a cloud solution25%
  • Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution20%
  • Configuring access and security17%

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Last updated July 19, 2026 at 5:47 AM

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QuestionQ1

Configuring access and security

An auditor for your organization wants to review how data in Google Cloud is being used. The auditor is most interested in seeing who has accessed data stored in Cloud Storage buckets. You need to help the auditor get access to the data they need. What should you do?

  • A Turn on Data Access Logs for the buckets they want to audit, and then build a query in the log viewer that filters on Cloud Storage.
  • B Assign the appropriate permissions, and then create a Data Studio report on Admin Activity Audit Logs.
  • C Assign the appropriate permissions, and then use Cloud Monitoring to review metrics.
  • D Use the export logs API to provide the Admin Activity Audit Logs in the format they want.
Explanation

Cloud Storage Data Access audit logs record read (and write) operations performed on objects and buckets, including who performed them, whereas Admin Activity audit logs only record configuration and metadata changes and do not track data access events. Because Data Access audit logs (other than BigQuery) are disabled by default due to their volume, they must be explicitly enabled for the buckets that need to be audited. Once enabled, the resulting log entries can be viewed and filtered in the Logs Explorer (log viewer) by filtering on the Cloud Storage resource type, giving the auditor the ability to see who accessed the data in those buckets.

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QuestionQ2

Configuring access and security

All development (dev) teams in your organization are located in the United States. Each dev team has its own Google Cloud project. You want to restrict access so that each dev team can only create cloud resources in the United States (US). What should you do?

  • A Create a folder to contain all the dev projects. Create an organization policy to limit resources in US locations.
  • B Create an organization to contain all the dev projects. Create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to limit the resources in US regions.
  • C Create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to restrict the resources locations in the US. Apply the policy to all dev projects.
  • D Create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to restrict the resources locations in all dev projects. Apply the policy to all dev roles.
Explanation

Organization Policy controls WHAT resources can be created (resource restrictions), while IAM controls WHO can take actions (identity-based access). Creating a folder to organize projects and applying an organization policy constraint to restrict resource locations to US fulfills the requirement. Organization policies cascade to child resources and projects within the folder.

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QuestionQ3

Planning and configuring a cloud solution

You are building a multi-player gaming application that will store game information in a database. As the popularity of the application increases, you are concerned about delivering consistent performance. You need to ensure an optimal gaming performance for global users, without increasing the management complexity. What should you do?

  • A Use Cloud SQL database with cross-region replication to store game statistics in the EU, US, and APAC regions.
  • B Use Cloud Spanner to store user data mapped to the game statistics.
  • C Use BigQuery to store game statistics with a Redis on Memorystore instance in the front to provide global consistency.
  • D Store game statistics in a Bigtable database partitioned by username.
Explanation

Cloud Spanner provides the optimal solution for multiplayer gaming requiring consistent performance across global users. It offers strong ACID transactions, global distribution, automatic scaling, and high availability—all with minimal operational complexity. Bigtable excels at massive scale but is NoSQL; Cloud SQL cannot scale horizontally across regions.

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QuestionQ4

Configuring access and security

Your organization enforces strict controls over access to Google Cloud projects. You need to allow your Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to approve access requests submitted by the Google Cloud support team whenever an SRE opens a support case. Following Google-recommended practices, what should you do?

  • A Add your SREs to roles/iam.roleAdmin role.
  • B Add your SREs to roles/accessapproval.approver role.
  • C Add your SREs to a group and then add this group to roles/iam.roleAdmin.role.
  • D Add your SREs to a group and then add this group to roles/accessapproval.approver role.
Explanation

Access Approval requires the roles/accessapproval.approver IAM role to grant users permission to approve or dismiss access requests from Google support/engineering staff. Google's IAM best practices recommend managing access through Google Groups rather than assigning roles directly to individual user accounts, because groups simplify access management, provide easier auditing, and reduce administrative overhead as team membership changes. Therefore, the correct approach is to add the SREs to a Google group and grant that group the roles/accessapproval.approver role. The roles/iam.roleAdmin role is unrelated to Access Approval—it only controls the ability to create and manage custom IAM roles—so it does not enable approval of support access requests.

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QuestionQ5

Configuring access and security

You are hosting an application on bare-metal servers in your own data center. The application needs access to Cloud Storage. However, security policies prevent the servers hosting the application from having public IP addresses or access to the internet. You want to follow Google-recommended practices to provide the application with access to Cloud Storage. What should you do?

  • A
    1. Use nslookup to get the IP address for storage.googleapis.com. 2. Negotiate with the security team to be able to give a public IP address to the servers. 3. Only allow egress traffic from those servers to the IP addresses for storage.googleapis.com.
  • B
    1. Using Cloud VPN, create a VPN tunnel to a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in Google Cloud. 2. In this VPC, create a Compute Engine instance and install the Squid proxy server on this instance. 3. Configure your servers to use that instance as a proxy to access Cloud Storage.
  • C
    1. Use Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly known as Velostrata) to migrate those servers to Compute Engine. 2. Create an internal load balancer (ILB) that uses storage.googleapis.com as backend. 3. Configure your new instances to use this ILB as proxy.
  • D
    1. Using Cloud VPN or Interconnect, create a tunnel to a VPC in Google Cloud. 2. Use Cloud Router to create a custom route advertisement for 199.36.153.4/30. Announce that network to your on-premises network through the VPN tunnel. 3. In your on-premises network, configure your DNS server to resolve *.googleapis.com as a CNAME to restricted.googleapis.com.
Explanation

Google's documented solution for this scenario is Private Google Access for on-premises hosts. It requires establishing private connectivity between the on-premises network and a Google Cloud VPC using Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect, then using Cloud Router to advertise a custom route for the restricted.googleapis.com virtual IP range (199.36.153.4/30) over that tunnel so on-premises traffic destined for Google APIs is routed privately rather than over the public internet. On the on-premises side, DNS must be configured so that requests to *.googleapis.com (including storage.googleapis.com) resolve via a CNAME to restricted.googleapis.com, which resolves to the 199.36.153.4/30 VIP range. Because this IP range is never announced publicly and is only reachable through the private VPN/Interconnect link, on-premises bare-metal servers can reach Cloud Storage without ever having a public IP address or open internet egress, while restricted.googleapis.com additionally limits access to only APIs/services supported by VPC Service Controls, reducing data-exfiltration risk. See Google Cloud's documentation, 'Private Google Access for on-premises hosts' and 'Configure Private Google Access for on-premises hosts.'

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