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CDL sample questions with answers

10 free practice questions for the Cloud Digital Leader exam. Try each one, then open the answer to see why the right option wins and every other option loses.

Question 1Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

After a painful decade tied to a single broadcast vendor, a media group refuses to sign anything that makes future exit expensive. It already runs containers in its own data centres. Which Google Cloud differentiator addresses that concern?

  1. A.

    The breadth of proprietary managed services

  2. B.

    Sustained price reductions on virtual machines

  3. C.

    Commercial agreements with two providers

  4. D.

    Open source and open standards

Show answer

Answer: D

Openness and interoperability through open source and open standards is the differentiator that keeps exit costs and lock-in low.

  • A. Standardising on proprietary tooling everywhere deliberately increases switching cost, the opposite of the requirement.
  • B. Lower prices reduce the cost of staying; they do nothing to make leaving feasible, which is the board's concern.
  • C. Dual contracts give price leverage but leave switching cost untouched if applications use proprietary interfaces.
  • D. Open source and open standards lower switching cost for both workloads and skills, which is what lock-in really measures.
Question 2Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

An insurer must launch a claims portal carrying proprietary underwriting logic in ten weeks. The team is four developers with no operations engineer, traffic will be unpredictable, and run cost must be minimal. Which choice fits best?

  1. A.

    Cloud Run, a managed platform

  2. B.

    Software as a Service claims product

  3. C.

    Compute Engine virtual machines

  4. D.

    A private cloud on dedicated hardware

Show answer

Answer: A

Custom logic plus no operations staff plus unpredictable traffic points to a managed platform such as Cloud Run.

  • A. Supports custom code, removes server operations from a team that cannot staff it, and scales with unpredictable demand.
  • B. Packaged software cannot host proprietary underwriting logic, and roadmap promises do not meet a ten-week deadline.
  • C. Virtual machines add patching, scaling and on-call work that four developers cannot absorb in ten weeks.
  • D. Dedicated hardware is slow and costly, and regulated insurance workloads run compliantly on Google Cloud's shared infrastructure.
Question 3Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A conveyancing firm's caseload is steady all year, but a rival launched online case tracking and took business. Which cloud benefit should lead its business case?

  1. A.

    Longer intervals between hardware refreshes

  2. B.

    Elastic capacity for unpredictable peaks

  3. C.

    Cheaper storage for archived deeds

  4. D.

    Faster delivery of new customer features

Show answer

Answer: D

With flat demand, the winning benefit is speed of delivery, not the elasticity that spiky workloads justify.

  • A. Refresh intervals belong to an ownership model being left behind and recover no lost business.
  • B. Elasticity pays off where load is spiky; the caseload is stated to be steady, so the saving would not appear.
  • C. Archive storage cost is marginal here and does nothing about the capability the rival shipped first.
  • D. Flat demand leaves speed of delivery as the benefit that addresses the competitive loss actually described.
Question 4Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A board proposes running every application on two clouds so that either can fail. Which consequence should the chief technology officer raise first?

  1. A.

    Duplicated skills, tooling and integration cost

  2. B.

    Free data transfer between clouds

  3. C.

    Resilience would become impossible to achieve

  4. D.

    Providers refuse such designs

Show answer

Answer: A

Mirroring everything across two providers multiplies skills, tooling and integration cost for limited added resilience.

  • A. Duplicated skills, tooling, controls and integration effort are the first and largest cost of mirroring everything.
  • B. Cross-cloud transfer is metered, and that charge is one of the costs the proposal has overlooked.
  • C. Resilience is achievable across two providers; the objection is its cost, not its impossibility.
  • D. Providers actively support multicloud architectures and sell products specifically for them.
Question 5Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A finance team asks why an internal database address cannot be reached from a hotel wireless network. Which explanation is correct?

  1. A.

    Encryption blocks all external access

  2. B.

    The connection's bandwidth is too low for the query

  3. C.

    It is a private address, not routable from the internet

  4. D.

    The domain registration has expired

Show answer

Answer: C

Internal systems use private addresses that are not routable on the public internet, so they are unreachable directly.

  • A. Encryption protects data in transit and does not determine whether a route to the address exists.
  • B. Insufficient bandwidth would make the connection slow, not prevent it from being established at all.
  • C. Private address ranges are deliberately not routed across the internet, so the database is unreachable directly.
  • D. An expired domain registration affects public name resolution, not the routability of an internal address.
Question 6Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A food bank network must launch a volunteer scheduling application within six weeks. Demand triples each winter and it employs no operations staff. Which two cloud benefits lead the business case? Choose TWO.

Choose 2.

  1. A.

    Automatic scaling with demand

  2. B.

    Dedicated hardware at each site

  3. C.

    Full operating system control

  4. D.

    A fixed annual capacity contract

  5. E.

    Rapid provisioning without procurement

Show answer

Answer: A, E

A six-week deadline and a seasonal demand spike are answered by rapid provisioning and automatic scaling.

  • A. Scaling that follows demand covers the winter tripling without paying for that capacity year-round.
  • B. Site hardware reintroduces the procurement and maintenance burden the deadline and staffing rule out.
  • C. Operating system control adds patching responsibility to an organisation with no operations staff.
  • D. A fixed annual contract either wastes capacity for most of the year or fails at the seasonal peak.
  • E. Provisioning without a procurement cycle is what makes a six-week launch achievable.
Question 7Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A defence contractor must run one classified workload on hardware dedicated solely to it. Which architecture fits, and what tradeoff does it accept?

  1. A.

    Multicloud; two providers reduce risk

  2. B.

    Private cloud; it still buys for peak capacity

  3. C.

    Public cloud with encryption; capacity is effectively unlimited

  4. D.

    Hybrid cloud; the workload bursts

Show answer

Answer: B

A dedicated-hardware requirement points to private cloud, whose tradeoff is buying and owning peak capacity.

  • A. Multicloud introduces a second shared-tenancy provider and leaves the dedication requirement unmet.
  • B. Dedicated hardware points to private cloud, and its accepted tradeoff is owning and funding peak capacity.
  • C. Encryption protects confidentiality but does not satisfy a rule about who else shares the physical hardware.
  • D. Bursting the classified workload into shared infrastructure is precisely what the classification prohibits.
Question 8Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

After a planned move to new servers, a portion of customers keep reaching the old site for several hours afterwards. Which setting explains the delay?

  1. A.

    The record's time to live

  2. B.

    The firewall's default rule

  3. C.

    The link's available bandwidth

  4. D.

    The load balancer's health check

Show answer

Answer: A

Resolvers cache a name for the record's time to live, so old answers persist until that period expires.

  • A. Resolvers may cache an answer for its time to live, so some customers keep the old address until it expires.
  • B. A blocking firewall rule produces connection failures, not successful visits to the old servers.
  • C. Low bandwidth would make the new site slow to load rather than send customers to the previous one.
  • D. A failing health check removes new servers from rotation and would surface as errors, not as old content.
Question 9Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A team running on virtual machines adds capacity by hand every Monday morning. If it moves to a managed platform, what changes about scaling?

  1. A.

    Scaling becomes impossible to control

  2. B.

    Capacity must be reserved annually

  3. C.

    The platform scales automatically with demand

  4. D.

    The team still sizes each machine itself

Show answer

Answer: C

A managed platform takes over capacity decisions, scaling with demand instead of relying on a weekly manual step.

  • A. Control is retained through bounds and targets; it is expressed as policy instead of a manual weekly action.
  • B. Annual reservation is a commitment arrangement for predictable capacity, not a characteristic of a managed platform.
  • C. Capacity decisions move to the platform, which scales with observed demand rather than on a weekly schedule.
  • D. Sizing individual machines is precisely the responsibility a managed platform takes over.
Question 10Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

A retailer's board paper uses the word infrastructure without ever defining it. Which description fits infrastructure in a cloud context?

  1. A.

    The organisation's data governance policy

  2. B.

    The applications staff use daily

  3. C.

    Contracts held with software vendors

  4. D.

    Compute, storage and networking resources

Show answer

Answer: D

Infrastructure means the underlying compute, storage and networking resources that applications run on.

  • A. A governance policy is a control document about data use, not a set of computing resources.
  • B. Applications sit on top of infrastructure and are a separate layer with different owners and lifecycles.
  • C. Vendor contracts are commercial agreements; they procure infrastructure but are not infrastructure.
  • D. Compute, storage and networking are exactly the resources the infrastructure layer provides.

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CDL sample questions with answers (10 free) · CertifyCloudx