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Question 181

Your organization needs to establish connectivity between Google Cloud and AWS for a multi-cloud deployment. You require encrypted, reliable connectivity with predictable performance. What is the recommended approach?

A) Site-to-site VPN between Google Cloud and AWS

B) Dedicated Interconnect to a colocation facility and cross-connect to AWS Direct Connect

C) Public internet connectivity between clouds

D) Third-party SD-WAN solution only

Answer: B

Explanation:

Establishing Dedicated Interconnect to a colocation facility and cross-connecting to AWS Direct Connect is the recommended approach for reliable, high-performance connectivity between Google Cloud and AWS in a multi-cloud deployment. This solution provides dedicated private connectivity without traversing the public internet.

The architecture involves provisioning a Dedicated Interconnect connection from your colocation facility to Google Cloud’s network, and separately establishing an AWS Direct Connect connection from the same colocation facility to AWS. Within the colocation facility, you create a cross-connect between the two circuits, effectively creating a private network bridge between the two cloud providers.

This approach provides several advantages including dedicated bandwidth ensuring predictable network performance, lower latency compared to internet-based solutions because traffic uses private network paths, enhanced security as data never traverses the public internet, reduced egress costs compared to internet data transfer, reliable connectivity with SLA-backed performance, and the ability to scale bandwidth based on requirements by adding additional circuits.

Implementation considerations include selecting a colocation facility that supports both Google Cloud Interconnect and AWS Direct Connect, coordinating circuit provisioning with both providers, configuring BGP routing to exchange routes between the clouds, implementing redundancy with multiple connections across diverse facilities for high availability, and ensuring proper security controls including encryption at the application layer if required.

Common use cases for multi-cloud connectivity include data replication between cloud providers, disaster recovery with failover between clouds, workload portability allowing applications to run in either environment, shared services accessible from both clouds, and hybrid architectures leveraging best-of-breed services from each provider.

Site-to-site VPN provides encrypted connectivity but offers lower bandwidth, higher latency, and less predictable performance compared to dedicated connections, making it suitable for smaller-scale or backup connectivity.

Public internet connectivity lacks security, reliability, and performance guarantees required for production multi-cloud deployments.

SD-WAN solutions can optimize multi-cloud connectivity but typically work best when combined with dedicated connections rather than replacing them.

Question 182

You are designing a network architecture for a globally distributed application that requires user traffic to be routed to the nearest healthy backend. The application serves both HTTP and TCP traffic. Which combination of load balancers should you implement?

A) External HTTP(S) Load Balancer for HTTP traffic and SSL Proxy Load Balancer for TCP traffic

B) External HTTP(S) Load Balancer for both HTTP and TCP traffic

C) Network Load Balancer for all traffic types

D) Internal Load Balancers in each region

Answer: A

Explanation:

Using External HTTP(S) Load Balancer for HTTP traffic and SSL Proxy Load Balancer for TCP traffic is the correct combination for a globally distributed application requiring routing to the nearest healthy backend for multiple traffic types. This approach leverages the optimal load balancer for each traffic type while providing global distribution.

The External HTTP(S) Load Balancer provides global load balancing for HTTP and HTTPS traffic using a single anycast IP address. It operates at Layer 7, enabling intelligent routing based on URL paths, host headers, and other HTTP attributes. Traffic is automatically routed to the nearest backend with available capacity through Google’s global network, providing optimal user experience with low latency.

The SSL Proxy Load Balancer provides global load balancing for encrypted, non-HTTP TCP traffic. It operates at Layer 4 and Layer 7, terminating SSL/TLS connections at Google’s edge locations and establishing new connections to backends. This offloads encryption processing from backend instances while providing global distribution. The service supports any TCP traffic over SSL/TLS and routes users to the nearest available backend.

Together, these load balancers provide comprehensive global load balancing coverage. The External HTTP(S) Load Balancer handles web traffic with features like URL mapping, Cloud CDN integration, and Cloud Armor security, while the SSL Proxy Load Balancer handles secure TCP traffic like encrypted database connections, SSL-based APIs, and custom protocols over TLS.

Both load balancers share common benefits including single global anycast IP simplifying DNS configuration, automatic health checking and failover to healthy backends, automatic scaling without pre-warming, integration with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, and traffic routing based on backend capacity and proximity to users.

Implementation involves creating separate load balancer configurations, each with backend services containing instances across multiple regions, configuring appropriate health checks for each traffic type, and managing SSL certificates for both load balancers.

External HTTP(S) Load Balancer cannot handle non-HTTP TCP traffic, making it insufficient for mixed protocol requirements.

Network Load Balancer is regional and does not provide global load balancing capabilities.

Question 183

Your company requires that all VM instances in a specific project can only communicate with approved external IP addresses. Internal communication within the VPC should remain unrestricted. How should you implement this requirement?

A) Create hierarchical firewall policies with deny rules for unapproved external IPs

B) Configure Cloud NAT with allow lists

C) Use VPC Service Controls to restrict egress

D) Implement proxy servers for all outbound traffic

Answer: A

Explanation:

Creating hierarchical firewall policies with deny rules for unapproved external IP addresses is the correct approach for restricting VM instances to communicate only with approved external IPs while keeping internal communication unrestricted. Hierarchical firewall policies provide centralized, scalable management of firewall rules across projects and organizations.

Hierarchical firewall policies are applied at the organization or folder level and are inherited by all resources within that scope, including projects, VPC networks, and VM instances. This centralized approach ensures consistent security policies across multiple projects without requiring individual firewall rule management in each network.

The implementation involves creating a hierarchical firewall policy at the appropriate organizational level, defining egress deny rules that block traffic to all external IP addresses by default, creating egress allow rules for approved external IP addresses or ranges that should be reachable, and ensuring these rules have appropriate priority. Internal traffic within RFC 1918 private address spaces remains allowed by creating allow rules or by the default behavior.

The policy structure typically includes high-priority rules allowing internal VPC communication using destination IP ranges matching your VPC subnets, medium-priority rules allowing specific approved external IPs or ranges, and low-priority deny rules blocking all other external traffic. Rule priorities determine evaluation order, with lower numbers evaluated first.

Benefits of hierarchical firewall policies include centralized management reducing administrative overhead, consistent security posture across the organization, inheritance ensuring new projects automatically receive policies, audit logging of policy changes and rule hits, and the ability to override or supplement with VPC-level firewall rules for specific requirements.

The approach supports complex scenarios including different approved external IPs for different projects using rule targeting, temporary access grants through time-limited rules, exception handling for specific workloads, and integration with security information and event management systems through Cloud Logging.

Cloud NAT provides network address translation but does not enforce granular destination IP restrictions or maintain detailed allow lists.

VPC Service Controls create security perimeters around Google Cloud services but do not restrict general internet egress to specific IPs.

Question 184

You need to migrate a legacy application that requires specific source IP addresses to be whitelisted by external partners. The application is moving from on-premises to Google Cloud Compute Engine instances behind a load balancer. How can you ensure consistent source IP addresses for outbound connections?

A) Assign static external IPs to each Compute Engine instance

B) Configure Cloud NAT with manually assigned static external IP addresses

C) Use Identity-Aware Proxy for outbound connections

D) Implement Cloud VPN with static IPs

Answer: B

Explanation:

Configuring Cloud NAT with manually assigned static external IP addresses is the correct solution for ensuring consistent source IP addresses for outbound connections from Compute Engine instances when external partners require whitelisting. This approach provides predictable, static IPs for egress traffic while maintaining the security benefits of private instances.

Cloud NAT allows you to manually specify which external IP addresses to use for network address translation instead of relying on automatically assigned ephemeral IPs. You create or reserve static external IP addresses in your project, then configure Cloud NAT to use these specific addresses for translating outbound traffic from your instances.

The implementation process involves reserving static external IP addresses in the same region as your Cloud NAT gateway, creating or modifying a Cloud NAT configuration on a Cloud Router, selecting manual IP address allocation mode, assigning your reserved static IPs to the NAT gateway, and configuring which subnets or instances use this NAT gateway. All outbound traffic from configured resources will appear to originate from the assigned static IPs.

This solution provides several benefits including consistent source IPs that external partners can whitelist in their firewalls, centralized management of egress IPs at the Cloud NAT level rather than per-instance, ability to use a small pool of static IPs for many instances reducing IP address consumption, maintained security with instances remaining private without individual external IPs, and simplified IP management when scaling instances since all share the same NAT IPs.

Additional capabilities include configuring multiple static IPs for higher port capacity, implementing separate NAT gateways for different subnets if different source IPs are needed, monitoring NAT usage and potential port exhaustion, and logging NAT translations for troubleshooting and auditing.

Assigning static external IPs to each instance exposes them directly to the internet, increases security risk, consumes more IP addresses, and complicates management when scaling.

Identity-Aware Proxy provides identity-based access control for inbound connections and does not manage outbound connection source IPs.

Cloud VPN is for site-to-site connectivity and not the appropriate solution for managing source IPs for general internet egress.

Question 185

Your organization is implementing a zero-trust security model and needs to enforce identity-based access control for internal web applications without requiring VPN. Users should authenticate before accessing applications. What solution should you implement?

A) VPC firewall rules with IP whitelisting

B) Identity-Aware Proxy

C) Cloud Armor security policies

D) OS Login for SSH access

Answer: B

Explanation:

Identity-Aware Proxy is the correct solution for implementing zero-trust security with identity-based access control for internal web applications without requiring VPN. IAP provides a simple way to establish a central authorization layer for applications accessed by HTTPS, enabling you to control who has access based on identity rather than network location.

IAP works by verifying user identity and context before allowing access to applications. When a user attempts to access an IAP-protected application, they are redirected to Google’s authentication service to verify their identity. IAP checks the user’s identity against configured access policies, evaluates context including device security status if using BeyondCorp Enterprise, and grants or denies access based on policy evaluation. Only authenticated and authorized users can reach the application.

The service provides comprehensive access control including integration with Cloud Identity or Google Workspace for user authentication, support for Google accounts, service accounts, and Cloud Identity users, group-based access policies simplifying management for large user populations, fine-grained access control per application or resource, context-aware access policies considering device security and location, and detailed audit logging of all access attempts.

Implementation involves enabling IAP for your application by configuring it on load balancers or App Engine applications, setting up OAuth consent screens, configuring IAM policies to grant IAP-secured Web App User role to authorized users or groups, and optionally implementing context-aware access policies for additional security. Applications behind IAP receive user identity information in headers, enabling application-level authorization decisions.

Benefits of IAP include eliminating VPN complexity and management overhead, providing consistent access control across cloud and on-premises applications, enabling remote work without traditional VPN, reducing attack surface by removing direct internet exposure, supporting zero-trust security models that never trust based solely on network location, and providing visibility into application access patterns through comprehensive logging.

VPC firewall rules with IP whitelisting are network-based controls that do not verify user identity and are incompatible with zero-trust principles.

Cloud Armor provides DDoS protection and WAF capabilities but does not enforce identity-based authentication.

Question 186

You are designing a disaster recovery solution for a critical application. The RTO is 4 hours and RPO is 1 hour. The application runs in us-central1 and you need to establish a DR site in us-east1. What network architecture should you implement?

A) Active-active configuration with global load balancing

B) Cold standby with no pre-configured network resources

C) Warm standby with pre-configured VPC networks and load balancers

D) Backup to Cloud Storage only

Answer: C

Explanation:

Implementing a warm standby with pre-configured VPC networks and load balancers is the appropriate disaster recovery architecture for meeting a 4-hour RTO and 1-hour RPO requirement. Warm standby provides a balance between cost and recovery time by maintaining infrastructure in the DR region while keeping compute resources minimal or stopped.

Warm standby architecture involves creating and configuring all necessary network infrastructure in the DR region including VPC networks with subnets, firewall rules, Cloud Routers, and load balancers. Compute instances are either running at minimal capacity or can be quickly launched from instance templates. Data replication mechanisms ensure data in the DR region is current within the RPO window.

The network configuration includes establishing VPC network peering or Shared VPC connections between primary and DR regions, configuring load balancers in both regions with backend services pointing to instances in respective regions, setting up Cloud DNS with health checks and failover routing to automatically redirect traffic to the DR region when primary fails, implementing database replication or snapshot processes to maintain data currency within RPO requirements, and pre-creating all firewall rules and routes needed for the DR environment.

During normal operations, the DR environment can run minimal compute capacity or use instance templates ready for rapid deployment. When disaster strikes, the recovery process involves scaling up or starting compute instances in the DR region, verifying data integrity and currency, updating DNS or load balancer configurations to direct traffic to DR region, and monitoring the recovered environment. The pre-configured network infrastructure enables rapid activation meeting the 4-hour RTO.

Benefits of warm standby include faster recovery than cold standby because infrastructure is pre-configured, lower costs than active-active because full production capacity is not continuously running, ability to test recovery procedures regularly by activating the DR environment, and flexibility to adjust capacity based on recovery requirements.

Active-active configuration provides the fastest recovery but at significantly higher cost as full infrastructure runs continuously in both regions, which may be unnecessary for a 4-hour RTO.

Cold standby with no pre-configured resources cannot meet a 4-hour RTO as infrastructure provisioning and configuration would extend recovery time.

Question 187

Your company operates a SaaS application serving customers globally. You need to implement network segmentation to isolate customer data while using shared application infrastructure. Each customer’s traffic must be logically separated. What is the most efficient approach?

A) Create separate VPC networks for each customer

B) Use VLANs with VLAN attachments for each customer

C) Implement application-level isolation with network tags and firewall rules

D) Deploy separate projects for each customer

Answer: C

Explanation:

Implementing application-level isolation with network tags and firewall rules is the most efficient approach for isolating customer data in a multi-tenant SaaS application while using shared infrastructure. This method provides logical segmentation without the overhead of creating separate network infrastructure for each customer.

Network tags are labels applied to compute instances that identify their role, customer affiliation, or other attributes. Firewall rules can use these tags to control traffic flow, creating isolation boundaries between different customers’ resources. Tags provide a flexible, scalable way to implement isolation policies that can easily accommodate new customers without architectural changes.

The implementation involves designing a tagging strategy where each instance is tagged with customer identifiers, developing a comprehensive set of firewall rules that use source and target tags to control traffic flow, ensuring instances can only communicate with other instances belonging to the same customer, allowing shared infrastructure components like load balancers and monitoring to communicate with all customer instances, and implementing strict rules preventing cross-customer communication.

Example firewall rules include allow rules permitting traffic between instances with matching customer tags, deny rules blocking traffic between different customer tags, allow rules for shared services using specific service tags, and logging rules to monitor and audit traffic patterns. Rule priority ensures isolation rules are evaluated appropriately.

This approach provides several benefits including efficient resource utilization by sharing infrastructure, scalability to thousands of customers without network resource limits, flexibility to adjust isolation policies without infrastructure changes, simplified management with centralized firewall policy, cost effectiveness compared to separate VPCs per customer, and ability to implement additional isolation through service accounts and IAM policies.

Application-level isolation can be enhanced with additional measures including separate service accounts per customer, Cloud KMS encryption keys per customer, separate database instances or schemas, VPC Service Controls for additional data protection, and comprehensive audit logging for compliance.

Creating separate VPC networks for each customer is inefficient, difficult to manage at scale, and hits project quota limits quickly.

VLANs with VLAN attachments are designed for hybrid connectivity scenarios, not multi-tenant isolation in cloud environments.

Question 188

You need to implement a solution that allows developers to SSH into Compute Engine instances without managing SSH keys or opening firewall ports to the internet. The solution should integrate with existing IAM policies. What should you configure?

A) Bastion host with public IP

B) Cloud VPN for developer access

C) Identity-Aware Proxy for TCP forwarding

D) OS Login with external IPs on all instances

Answer: C

Explanation:

Identity-Aware Proxy for TCP forwarding is the correct solution for allowing developers to SSH into Compute Engine instances without managing SSH keys or opening firewall ports to the internet while integrating with IAM policies. IAP TCP forwarding provides secure, managed access to instances through an encrypted tunnel.

IAP TCP forwarding creates secure tunnels from client machines to instances in Google Cloud without requiring external IP addresses on those instances or opening SSH ports to the internet. When developers connect, IAP authenticates their identity using Google credentials, verifies they have appropriate IAM permissions, establishes an encrypted tunnel through Google’s infrastructure, and forwards SSH or RDP traffic through this tunnel to the target instance.

Implementation involves enabling IAP API in your project, configuring firewall rules to allow ingress from IAP’s IP range on ports 22 for SSH or 3389 for RDP, granting IAM roles including IAP-secured Tunnel User to developers who need access, and optionally enabling OS Login for automated SSH key management. Developers connect using gcloud compute ssh with the –tunnel-through-iap flag, which automatically handles tunnel establishment.

The solution provides numerous security and operational benefits including no external IPs needed on instances reducing attack surface, centralized access control through IAM without separate SSH key management, comprehensive audit logging of all access attempts and sessions, support for context-aware access policies based on user location and device security, elimination of VPN infrastructure and management overhead, fine-grained access control with permissions at instance or project level, and integration with existing identity providers through Cloud Identity or Google Workspace.

IAP TCP forwarding supports not only SSH and RDP but also other TCP protocols, enabling secure access to databases, web applications, and custom services. Access policies can enforce additional requirements like device certificates, geographic restrictions, or security key authentication.

Bastion hosts require management overhead, expose a public entry point, and require SSH key management, defeating the goals of simplified access.

Cloud VPN requires significant infrastructure setup and ongoing management that IAP eliminates.

OS Login helps manage SSH keys but requires external IPs and open firewall ports when used without IAP.

Question 189

Your organization runs a latency-sensitive trading application requiring sub-millisecond response times. The application consists of multiple microservices that need to communicate frequently. How should you optimize the network architecture?

A) Deploy microservices across multiple regions for redundancy

B) Use Premium Tier networking and compact placement policies within a single zone

C) Implement Cloud CDN for all microservice communication

D) Use Standard Tier networking to reduce costs

Answer: B

Explanation:

Using Premium Tier networking and compact placement policies within a single zone is the correct approach for optimizing network architecture for latency-sensitive trading applications requiring sub-millisecond response times. This combination minimizes network latency between microservices through both global network optimization and physical placement.

Premium Tier networking routes traffic through Google’s private global network, ensuring predictable, low-latency connectivity with fewer hops and consistent performance. Premium Tier uses Google’s extensive fiber network and edge points of presence worldwide to optimize routing paths. For internal communication within Google Cloud, Premium Tier ensures traffic uses the optimal network paths.

Compact placement policies instruct Google Cloud to place VM instances in close physical proximity within a data center, typically on the same rack or nearby racks. This physical colocation dramatically reduces network latency between instances, achieving single-digit microsecond latencies for inter-instance communication. For applications like high-frequency trading that require sub-millisecond response times, this physical proximity is essential.

The combined implementation involves selecting a single zone appropriate for your latency requirements considering geographic proximity to trading venues, creating a compact placement policy in that zone, deploying all microservices within instance groups using the compact placement policy, configuring Premium Tier networking for the VPC network, and ensuring instances use high-performance machine types with sufficient network bandwidth.

Additional optimizations include using local SSDs for minimum storage latency, configuring applications to use internal IP addresses for direct communication, implementing efficient protocols like gRPC for microservice communication, tuning operating system and network stack parameters, and monitoring network latency metrics to identify performance issues.

Trade-offs of this approach include reduced geographic redundancy because all instances are in a single zone, making the architecture suitable for performance-critical components while using multi-region deployment for non-latency-sensitive components and disaster recovery.

Deploying across multiple regions increases latency due to geographic distance and contradicts sub-millisecond requirements.

Cloud CDN is for caching static content for end users, not for microservice-to-microservice communication optimization.

Standard Tier networking uses public internet routing with higher latency and less predictable performance.

Question 190

You are migrating an application from on-premises to Google Cloud. The application uses multicast for communication between servers. How should you implement multicast communication in Google Cloud?

A) Use standard VPC networking as it supports multicast natively

B) Implement application-level message distribution using Pub/Sub

C) Configure IGMP on all instances

D) Use overlay networking with GRE tunnels

Answer: B

Explanation:

Implementing application-level message distribution using Pub/Sub is the recommended approach for replacing multicast communication when migrating to Google Cloud, as Google Cloud VPC networks do not support IP multicast protocols. Pub/Sub provides a scalable, managed messaging service that achieves the same communication patterns as multicast.

Google Cloud VPC networks do not support traditional IP multicast protocols like IGMP because the underlying network architecture is designed differently from traditional on-premises networks. Attempting to use multicast protocols directly will not work. Applications requiring multicast-style communication need to be refactored to use alternative approaches.

Cloud Pub/Sub provides publish-subscribe messaging where publishers send messages to topics, and subscribers receive messages from subscriptions to those topics. This pattern effectively replaces multicast by enabling one-to-many message distribution. Publishers do not need to know about subscribers, and multiple subscribers can receive the same message independently, mirroring multicast behavior.

Implementation involves refactoring the application to use Pub/Sub APIs instead of multicast sockets, creating Pub/Sub topics for each multicast group that existed in the original architecture, creating subscriptions for each server that needs to receive messages from a particular group, modifying publisher code to send messages to Pub/Sub topics, and updating subscriber code to receive messages from subscriptions with appropriate processing logic.

Benefits of this approach include managed service eliminating infrastructure management, automatic scaling to handle any message volume, guaranteed message delivery with configurable retry policies, message persistence ensuring no data loss, ability to add subscribers without impacting publishers, global availability enabling cross-region communication, and integration with other Google Cloud services for processing and analytics.

Alternative approaches for specific use cases include using direct instance-to-instance communication for small-scale scenarios, implementing application-level broadcasting through load balancers, or using third-party overlay networking solutions, though these add complexity compared to managed services.

VPC networking does not support IP multicast natively, making this option incorrect.

IGMP configuration on instances will not work because the underlying network infrastructure does not support multicast routing.

Question 191

Your company needs to inspect all traffic between your VPC network and the internet for security threats, including encrypted traffic. The solution must support SSL/TLS inspection. What architecture should you implement?

A) Cloud Armor with WAF rules

B) Deploy third-party security appliances with SSL inspection capabilities

C) Use VPC firewall rules with logging

D) Enable VPC Flow Logs with encryption

Answer: B

Explanation:

Deploying third-party security appliances with SSL inspection capabilities is the correct approach for inspecting all traffic between your VPC network and the internet, including encrypted SSL/TLS traffic, for security threats. This architecture provides deep packet inspection with the ability to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt traffic.

Third-party network security appliances from vendors like Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point, and others are available in Google Cloud Marketplace and provide advanced security features including next-generation firewall capabilities, intrusion prevention systems, SSL/TLS decryption and inspection, URL filtering and web filtering, malware detection, data loss prevention, and application awareness and control.

The implementation architecture involves deploying security appliances as VM instances in your VPC network, configuring custom routes to direct traffic through the security appliances using next-hop-instance routing, implementing high availability with multiple appliances behind internal load balancers, configuring the appliances to decrypt SSL/TLS traffic using trusted certificates, performing security inspection on decrypted traffic, and re-encrypting traffic before forwarding to destinations.

Network topology options include transparent proxy mode where appliances sit inline in the traffic path, explicit proxy mode where clients are configured to send traffic to proxies, or gateway mode where appliances act as next-hop gateways. For complete traffic inspection, custom routes with 0.0.0.0/0 destination direct internet-bound traffic to appliances before it reaches the internet gateway.

SSL inspection configuration requires careful certificate management including deploying trusted CA certificates to client devices or instances, configuring appliances to present valid certificates for inspected connections, handling certificate pinning in applications that validate specific certificates, and considering privacy and compliance implications of decrypting traffic.

Additional considerations include ensuring appliances have sufficient capacity for traffic volume and SSL processing overhead, implementing redundancy across zones for high availability, monitoring appliance performance and security alerts, maintaining appliance software and threat signatures, and configuring bypass rules for traffic that should not be inspected such as healthcare or financial data subject to specific regulations.

Cloud Armor provides DDoS protection and WAF capabilities but does not decrypt and inspect SSL/TLS traffic content.

VPC firewall rules operate at network and transport layers and cannot inspect encrypted application-layer content.

VPC Flow Logs capture metadata about traffic flows but do not perform content inspection or decrypt encrypted traffic.

Question 192

You need to establish connectivity between your Google Cloud VPC network and multiple AWS VPCs in different regions. The solution should minimize complexity while providing secure, private connectivity. What approach should you use?

A) Establish separate Cloud VPN connections to each AWS VPC

B) Use Dedicated Interconnect with cross-connects to AWS Direct Connect and route to multiple VPCs

C) Implement a hub-and-spoke topology with one connection to AWS Transit Gateway

D) Use public internet with firewall rules

Answer: C

Explanation:

Implementing a hub-and-spoke topology with one connection to AWS Transit Gateway is the most efficient approach for establishing connectivity between your Google Cloud VPC and multiple AWS VPCs in different regions while minimizing complexity. AWS Transit Gateway acts as a central hub connecting multiple VPCs, requiring only one connection from Google Cloud.

AWS Transit Gateway is a managed service that acts as a network transit hub enabling connections between thousands of VPCs and on-premises networks through a central gateway. By connecting your Google Cloud network to AWS Transit Gateway, you gain connectivity to all VPCs attached to that gateway without requiring separate connections to each VPC.

The architecture involves establishing a single connection from Google Cloud to AWS, which can be either Cloud VPN for encrypted internet-based connectivity or Dedicated Interconnect with cross-connect to AWS Direct Connect for dedicated private connectivity. On the AWS side, all VPCs in various regions connect to AWS Transit Gateway, with inter-region Transit Gateway peering enabling cross-region connectivity. The single Google Cloud to AWS connection provides access to all attached VPCs.

Benefits of this approach include simplified network topology with one connection instead of many, centralized routing management at the Transit Gateway, reduced configuration and management overhead, easier addition of new AWS VPCs without modifying Google Cloud network, lower cost with one connection and associated charges, and scalability to hundreds of VPCs without connection proliferation.

Implementation steps include configuring AWS Transit Gateway in the primary AWS region, attaching all relevant AWS VPCs to the Transit Gateway, configuring Transit Gateway route tables to enable inter-VPC routing, establishing connectivity from Google Cloud to AWS using VPN or Interconnect, configuring BGP routing to advertise Google Cloud and AWS routes appropriately, and testing connectivity between Google Cloud resources and resources in various AWS VPCs.

Establishing separate VPN connections to each AWS VPC creates management complexity, increases costs, and becomes unwieldy with many VPCs.

Dedicated Interconnect with Direct Connect provides high performance but is more expensive and complex than necessary when Transit Gateway can consolidate connectivity.

Public internet lacks security, reliability, and performance characteristics required for production multi-cloud architectures.

Question 193

Your organization uses Shared VPC and needs to provide developers in different projects the ability to create instances and attach them to specific subnets, but not modify the VPC network itself. How should you configure IAM permissions?

A) Grant Compute Network Admin role at project level

B) Grant Compute Network User role on specific subnets

C) Grant Compute Instance Admin at project level only

D) Grant Editor role on service projects

Answer: B

Explanation:

Granting Compute Network User role on specific subnets is the correct approach for allowing developers in service projects to create instances and attach them to specific subnets in a Shared VPC without giving them permissions to modify the VPC network itself. This follows the principle of least privilege by providing only the necessary permissions.

Shared VPC architecture consists of a host project containing the VPC network and service projects where compute resources are created. The Shared VPC model separates network administration from resource administration, enabling centralized network management while allowing distributed resource creation.

The Compute Network User role includes permissions to create instances and attach them to subnets, attach existing resources to subnets, and read subnet information necessary for resource creation. Importantly, it does not include permissions to create, modify, or delete VPC networks, subnets, firewall rules, routes, or other network resources. This limitation ensures network administrators maintain control over network configuration while enabling developers to deploy applications.

Implementation involves identifying the specific subnets in the Shared VPC that each service project should be able to use, granting the Compute Network User role to service project developers at the subnet level using IAM conditions if needed for fine-grained control, granting appropriate compute instance creation permissions in the service projects such as Compute Instance Admin, and documenting which projects can use which subnets for governance and compliance.

This permission model enables several operational benefits including network teams maintaining centralized control over network topology, security policies, and connectivity, application teams working independently to deploy and manage their applications, clear separation of responsibilities reducing conflicts and errors, compliance with security policies requiring network isolation, and ability to share network resources like VPN connections and Interconnects across projects while maintaining project isolation.

Additional considerations include using IAM conditions to restrict subnet usage based on attributes like region or environment, implementing organization policies to enforce governance requirements, monitoring resource creation for capacity planning, and regularly reviewing IAM permissions to maintain least privilege.

Compute Network Admin role provides permissions to modify network resources, which contradicts the requirement to prevent VPC modification.

Compute Instance Admin alone does not provide permissions to use Shared VPC subnets.

Editor role is overly permissive and would allow modification of many resources beyond requirements.

Question 194

You are experiencing intermittent connectivity issues between instances in different zones within the same region. You need to diagnose the problem. What tools and approaches should you use?

A) Only check VPC firewall rules

B) Use VPC Flow Logs, Connectivity Tests, and Performance Dashboard

C) Restart all instances to reset connections

D) Recreate the VPC network

Answer: B

Explanation:

Using VPC Flow Logs, Connectivity Tests, and Performance Dashboard is the comprehensive approach for diagnosing intermittent connectivity issues between instances in different zones. These tools provide complementary insights into network behavior, configuration, and performance.

VPC Flow Logs capture samples of network flows sent from and received by VM instances, providing detailed information about communication attempts including successful and failed connections. When investigating connectivity issues, Flow Logs help identify whether packets are being sent, whether they reach destinations, whether responses are received, and whether any traffic is being dropped. You can filter logs by source and destination IPs, ports, and time ranges to focus on problematic connections.

Connectivity Tests is a diagnostic tool that simulates network connectivity between endpoints and analyzes the configuration of firewall rules, routes, and network policies to determine whether connectivity should work. The tool performs static analysis of network configuration without sending actual packets, identifying configuration issues like missing firewall rules, incorrect routes, or conflicting policies. For intermittent issues, running tests during problem periods and normal periods helps identify dynamic factors.

Performance Dashboard provides visibility into network performance metrics including latency, packet loss, and throughput between zones and regions. For intermittent connectivity issues, performance metrics can reveal whether problems correlate with network congestion, high latency periods, or packet loss events. The dashboard helps distinguish between configuration issues and performance degradation.

The diagnostic process involves enabling VPC Flow Logs for affected subnets if not already enabled, reviewing Flow Logs during problem periods to identify dropped packets or failed connections, running Connectivity Tests between affected instances to verify configuration correctness, checking Performance Dashboard for latency or packet loss correlation with connectivity issues, examining instance health and resource utilization as local factors, reviewing recent changes to network configuration, firewall rules, or routes, and testing connectivity using tools like ping, traceroute, and application-level testing.

Common causes of intermittent connectivity include firewall rules with incorrect or incomplete configurations, routes being added or removed dynamically, instances experiencing resource exhaustion affecting network stack, DNS resolution failures, application-level issues like connection timeouts, or transient network conditions affecting performance.

Checking only firewall rules is insufficient as connectivity issues can have many causes beyond firewall configuration.

Restarting instances might temporarily mask issues but does not diagnose root causes.

Question 195

Your company is implementing a security requirement that all traffic between VPC networks must be encrypted, including traffic that already transports encrypted data. How should you implement network-level encryption?

A) Enable VPC Network Peering with automatic encryption

B) Use VPN tunnels between VPC networks

C) Rely on application-level encryption only

D) Configure IPsec on all instances

Answer: B

Explanation:

Using VPN tunnels between VPC networks is the correct approach for implementing network-level encryption for all traffic between VPC networks when security requirements mandate encryption at the network layer. Cloud VPN provides encrypted tunnels that protect all traffic regardless of application-level encryption.

Cloud VPN uses IPsec protocol to create encrypted tunnels between VPC networks, encrypting all IP traffic passing through the tunnel including TCP, UDP, and ICMP. This network-layer encryption provides defense in depth by adding an additional encryption layer even for traffic that is already encrypted at the application layer, meeting stringent security requirements for sensitive environments.

Implementation options include HA VPN for high availability and better SLA, which creates encrypted tunnels between Cloud VPN gateways in different VPC networks, or Classic VPN for simpler deployments. HA VPN is recommended for production workloads due to its 99.99% service availability SLA when configured properly with redundant tunnels.

The architecture involves creating HA VPN gateways in each VPC network requiring encrypted communication, configuring external VPN gateway resources representing the peer VPC’s VPN gateway, creating VPN tunnels between gateways with IPsec encryption, configuring Cloud Router for dynamic routing with BGP to exchange routes between networks, and verifying that traffic flows through encrypted tunnels using Flow Logs.

Benefits of this approach include network-level encryption meeting compliance requirements, independence from application implementations ensuring all traffic is encrypted, protection against network-layer attacks and eavesdropping, audit trail through VPN logs, and compatibility with all applications and protocols without modification.

Performance considerations include VPN encryption overhead adding latency typically 1-2 milliseconds, throughput limits per tunnel currently 3 Gbps per tunnel requiring multiple tunnels for higher bandwidth, and ensuring VPN gateways are appropriately sized for traffic volume.

VPC Network Peering does not provide encryption; traffic between peered networks travels over Google’s network without additional encryption beyond physical security.

Relying solely on application-level encryption does not meet requirements for network-level encryption and leaves unencrypted traffic vulnerable.

Configuring IPsec on individual instances is operationally complex, difficult to manage at scale, and error-prone compared to managed VPN services.