GCP ACE case studies

GCP ACE · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification is a foundational credential for practitioners who deploy and secure applications, services, and infrastructure on Google Cloud. Google frames the role as someone who monitors operations across multiple projects and maintains enterprise solutions to meet target performance metrics, drawing on experience with public cloud or on-premises environments. The GCP ACE case studies are 5 cases and about 4,019 words.

One shared project, one billing account, two years of drift

Meridian Retail has one Google Cloud organization, a single billing account, and 38 projects created ad hoc over two years. Production and staging for the same service share one project because it was quicker.

848 words, about 4 min 2

A latency SLO, a cacheable API, and a data-residency rule that fights both

Playback Analytics runs a REST API on Compute Engine behind an external passthrough Network Load Balancer in us-central1; p99 latency for Sydney users is 210 ms against a 150 ms target. About 80% of responses are byte-identical for roughly 60 seconds and are safe to cache.

781 words, about 4 min 3

Cloud Run at the instance ceiling with a 1.9 GB image

FleetOps deploys a containerized dispatch API to Cloud Run in us-central1. The service talks to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL over private IP and publishes to Pub/Sub.

834 words, about 4 min 4

An SLO nobody was alerted on, and debugging logs nobody can afford

A logistics company runs GKE Standard 1.29 with 30 nodes plus one Cloud SQL instance. Its customer-facing tracking service has a contractual availability SLO of 99.9% over 28 days.

760 words, about 4 min 5

A leaked key, unanswerable deletions, and a CMEK mandate

stores PHI in BigQuery datasets and DICOM images in a Cloud Storage bucket. An external audit produced four findings: a service account JSON key is committed to a public repository and is still in use by an on-premises ETL server; BigQuery and Cloud Storage use Google-managed keys, but policy now requires customer-managed keys with 90-day rotation; nobody can determine who deleted 400 objects from the bucket last month; and a data analyst holds roles/editor on the project.

796 words, about 4 min