Professional Cloud Architect Google Exam Practice Test 2025

A public key infrastructure is the system of certificates, certificate authorities and revocation mechanisms that lets a party verify which identity a public key belongs to before trusting it.

Authentication is the process of confirming that a user, device or service is who it claims to be, typically by checking something it knows, has or is.

Multi-factor authentication requires proof from at least two different kinds of factor, such as a password and a device-generated code, so that stealing one is not enough to log in.

Subnetting divides an address block into smaller networks by choosing how many leading bits identify the network, written as a prefix length or a subnet mask, so that each subnet has its own range of host addresses and its own routing entry.

Routing is how packets move between networks: each router holds a table of known destinations and the next hop toward each, learned by configuration or by a protocol, and forwards each packet to the most specific match.

Switching is the forwarding of frames within a single network segment by a device that learns which hardware address sits on which port and sends each frame only where it needs to go.

PaaS is a hosting layer that takes your source code and turns it into a running application for you, owning the machines, the runtime, the build, the routing, the certificates and the restarts, so that shipping becomes a push rather than a project.

Serverless computing runs your code only while an event is calling it: the provider conjures an execution environment on demand, throws it away afterwards, and charges for work performed instead of for capacity sitting idle.

A container is an application packaged together with the libraries and configuration it needs, run as an isolated process on a host that is already switched on, so the same package behaves the same way on a laptop, in a build pipeline and in production.

Caching keeps the result of expensive work, such as a rendered page or a database query, and serves that stored copy until it expires, making it the largest single source of speed on any busy website.

Uptime is the proportion of time a service answers requests, quoted in nines, and a service level agreement is the contract clause setting out how that proportion is counted and what the provider owes when it falls short.

Shared hosting puts your website on a machine that is simultaneously running hundreds of other people's, pooling its processor, memory and disk between all of you, which is both why it costs so little and why your speed partly depends on strangers.