Google Compute Engine (GCE)

Question 1

With respect to billing for virtual networking instances, what are you not billed for?

Answer 1

Traffic ingress (into the network from the Internet).
VM to VM traffic within a single zone.
Traffic to GCP services, although limits apply.

Question 2

With respect to billing for virtual networking instances, what are you billed for?

Answer 2

Traffic egress (out to the Internet).
From one region to another (North America to Europe),.
Rates will vary depending on whether data is going to one part of the same region to another, or to another continent

Question 3

What is a Bastion Host?

Answer 3

It is a virtual machine that act as an entry point to the GCP network from an external computer/network. It can serve as a NAT Gateway or for a site to site VPN.

Question 4

What is a managed instance group?

Answer 4

It is a group of virtual machine instances that created using a single instance template which contain all of the configuration info on the machines (i.e. # of CPUs, storage, RAM, etc.). As a result, you control/manage this group of instances as a single unit. Two types are Zonal and Regional. Useful for recovery after a failure, scaling per user needs, migrating instance.

Question 5

True or False:

An instance template is always a global resource, not bound to a zone or region.

Answer 5

False.
While instance templates are not bound to zones or regions, some GCP resources are. Therefore, if you include a zonal or regional resource in your instance template, it becomes bound to the specific zone(s) or region(s) where that service is available.

Question 6

What is an Unmanaged Instance group?

Answer 6

It is a group of virtual machine instances that are not all the same which you can arbitrarily add or remove from a group. Unmanaged Instances do not offer autoscaling, rolling update support, or use of instance templates. Google recommends against their usage.

Question 7

What is the use case for an Unmanaged Instance

Answer 7

Use only for applying load balancing to your pre-existing configurations or to groups of dissimilar instances.

Question 8

What are the 4 virtual machine disk types

Answer 8

Persistent disk HDD, Persistent disk SSD, Local SSD disk, and RAM disk

Question 9

True or False:

It is okay to use a virtual machine with a local SSD.

Answer 9

False.

Local SSDs cannot be backed up and will just be discarded. Snapshots are not available for SSDs.