Challenge Questions

Review the documentation links for the following products and answer the following questions:

Cloud CDN and Cloud CDN Interconnect

1. What is the difference between Cloud CDN and Cloud CDN Interconnect? See below
2. What benefits does Cloud CDN Interconnect give customers? Cheaper network connections
to third party CDNs
3. What benefits does Cloud CDN give customers? Delivers static content faster; mitigates
DDoS attack
4. What locations around the world does Cloud CDN use for caching content? Why does this
matter? See documentation. Ideally I want application users to be close to caching
locations
5. When would you use Google’s CDN versus using that of a third party provider for your
application? Compare costs and caching locations of each option

VPC Flow Logs and Firewall Logs

1. What is the difference between VPC flow logs and Firewall Logs. When would you use each?
Flow logs show communication between VMs on the subnet. Firewall logs show the
access decisions made by a particular firewall rule.

2. At what level do you enable (i) VPC flow logs and (ii) firewall logs? (i) subnet level (ii)
individual firewall rule level

Cloud Spanner

1. What is the difference between an instance and a replica in Spanner? An instance refers to
the configuration as a whole, which is made up of 3 or more replicas (depending on
whether it is a regional or multi-regional configuration).
2. How many replicas are created in (i) a regional configuration ;(ii) a nam3 configuration and
(iii) a nam-eur-asia1 configuration? (i) 3 (ii) 4 (iii) 8
3. What is the difference between a read/write replica and a read replica in Spanner?
https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/replication#replica_types
4. If I create a regional Spanner instance with 3 nodes, how many VMs are created in total? 9
Cloud SQL

1. When are Cloud SQL backups taken, and where are they stored? Cloud SQL backups are
taken automatically at the time you specify in your automatic backup window. For 2 nd Gen
MySQL, they can also be taken on an ad hoc basis. Backups are stored in two regions (for
geo-redundancy)
2. How do I do a restore in Cloud SQL? What do I need to set up to enable point-in-time (PiT)
recoveries in Cloud SQL? Restores can be done via the console or the command line.
Binary logging (in MYSQL) needs to be enabled to do PiT recoveries.
3. What is private IP in Cloud SQL and what are the advantages of it? Private IP means your
database instance does not have an external IP address. This enables faster/cheaper
communication from clients within GCP, and also provides greater security
4. What is external replication in Cloud SQL (MYSQL), and what replication types are supported
by external replication? External replication involves replication between a Cloud SQL
instance and an instance external to Cloud SQL (e.g. running on GCE). Use cases can be seen
here

BigTable

1. You are considering what to use as your primary key on your BigTable. Why is using a simple
sequence number that increases every time you do an insert not the best choice for your
primary key? Using a simple sequence number as a primary key would create a hotspot for
inserts at the end of the table, as data is stored in primary key order
2. What types of replication (e.g. across zones, across regions etc) are supported by BigTable?
When would you use each type? Replication is supported across zones and across regions.
Choose replication options based on availability options and latency considerations.
3. In BigTable when would you increase the number of nodes based on (i) data capacity and (ii)
throughput? You need a certain number of nodes based on storage e.g. a node for each
2.5TB of SSD data. You could also add more nodes above this to increase throughput
(10,000 ops per node)
4. What feature of BigTable makes it especially suitable for sparse data sets? If a cell has no
value in it, no space is consumed.
5. T/F? BigTable can keep multiple versions of a cell value at one time. True