Google Updated Professional-Cloud-DevOps-Engineer Exam Questions and Answers by eben

The best option to give developers the ability to manage infrastructure as code, while ensuring that you follow Google-recommended practices, is to install and configure Config Connector in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Config Connector is a Kubernetes add-on that allows you to manage Google Cloud resources through Kubernetes. You can use Config Connector to create, update, and delete Google Cloud resources using Kubernetes manifests.Config Connector also reconciles the state of the Google Cloud resources with the desired state defined in the manifests, ensuring that there is no configuration drift1.

Config Connector follows the GitOps methodology, as it allows you to store your infrastructure configuration in a Git repository, and use tools such as Anthos Config Management or Cloud Source Repositories to sync the configuration to your GKE cluster.This way, you can use Git as the source of truth for your infrastructure, and enable reviewable and version-controlled workflows2.

Config Connector can be installed and configured in GKE using either the Google Cloud Console or the gcloud command-line tool. You need to enable the Config Connector add-on for your GKE cluster, and create a Google Cloud service account with the necessary permissions to manage the Google Cloud resources.You also need to create a Kubernetes namespace for each Google Cloud project that you want to manage with Config Connector3.

By using Config Connector in GKE, you can give developers the ability to manage infrastructure as code, while ensuring that you follow Google-recommended practices.You can also benefit from the features and advantages of Kubernetes, such as declarative configuration, observability, and portability4.

The correct answer is C. Configure Cloud Profiler, and initialize the cloud.google.com/go/profiler library in the application.

According to the Google Cloud documentation, Cloud Profiler is a statistical, low-overhead profiler that continuously gathers CPU usage and memory-allocation information from your production applications1. Cloud Profiler can help you identify slow paths in your code and optimize the performance of your applications. Cloud Profiler supports applications written in Go that run on App Engine standard environment2. To use Cloud Profiler, you need to configure it in your Google Cloud project and initialize the cloud.google.com/go/profiler library in your application code3. You can then use the Cloud Profiler interface to analyze the profiling data and visualize the results by using flame graphs4. Cloud Profiler has minimal performance impact and management overhead, as it only samples a small fraction of the application activity and does not require any additional infrastructure or agents.

The other options are incorrect because they do not meet the requirements of minimizing performance impact and management overhead. Option A is incorrect because it requires installing a continuous profiling tool into Compute Engine, which is an additional infrastructure that needs to be managed and maintained. Option B is incorrect because it requires periodically running the go tool pprof command against the application instance, which is a manual and disruptive process that can affect the application performance. Option D is incorrect because it only uses Cloud Monitoring to assess the App Engine CPU utilization metric, which is not enough to identify slow paths in the code or optimize the application performance.

The best option for selecting a deployment and testing strategy that meets your requirements is to use blue/green deployment and canary testing. A blue/green deployment is a deployment strategy that involves creating two identical environments, one running the current version of the application (blue) and one running the new version of the application (green). The traffic is switched from blue to green after testing the new version, and if any issues are discovered, the traffic can be switched back to blue instantly. This way, you can reduce the complexity of release deployments and minimize the duration of deployment rollbacks. A canary testing is a testing strategy that involves releasing a new version of an application to a subset of users or servers and monitoring its performance and reliability. This way, you can test real production traffic with a gradual increase in the number of affected users.

The best options for ensuring that the pipelines that run in the Pods have the appropriate IAM permissions to perform the Terraform deployments are to create a new Kubernetes service account and assign the service account to the Pods, and to use Workload Identity to authenticate as the Google service account. A Kubernetes service account is an identity that represents an application or a process running in a Pod. A Google service account is an identity that represents a Google Cloud resource or service. Workload Identity is a feature that allows you to bind Kubernetes service accounts to Google service accounts. By using Workload Identity, you can avoid creating and managing JSON service account keys, which are less secure and require more maintenance. You can also assign the appropriate IAM permissions to the Google service account that corresponds to the Kubernetes service account.