GKE Certification – Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
Exam-Focused Questions and Answers (2026)
Exam Overview (Quick Context)
The Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam focuses on:
- GKE reliability & scalability
- CI/CD automation
- Monitoring & observability
- Incident response
- Security & compliance
1. How does GKE support Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles?
Answer:
GKE supports SRE by providing:
- Auto-scaling & auto-repair
- Self-healing pods
- Rolling & surge upgrades
- SLI/SLO monitoring via Cloud Monitoring
- Error budget–driven releases
2. Which GKE features help improve service reliability?
Answer:
- Regional clusters
- PodDisruptionBudgets (PDB)
- Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
- Cluster Autoscaler
- Multi-zone node pools
3. How do you design a highly available GKE architecture?
Answer:
- Use regional GKE clusters
- Deploy workloads across multiple zones
- Use Ingress with Google Cloud Load Balancer
- Configure readiness & liveness probes
- Apply replica counts ≥ 3
4. How does GKE help reduce Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)?
Answer:
- Auto-repair recreates unhealthy nodes
- Kubernetes restarts failed pods automatically
- Cloud Monitoring alerts trigger faster response
- Rolling updates allow quick rollback
5. What is the role of SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs in GKE?
Answer:
- SLI: Metrics like latency, error rate
- SLO: Target reliability (e.g., 99.9%)
- SLA: Contractual guarantee
GKE integrates these via Cloud Monitoring dashboards and alerts.
6. How do you implement CI/CD for GKE?
Answer:
Typical pipeline:
- Code pushed to GitHub
- Cloud Build builds container
- Image stored in Artifact Registry
- Deploy to GKE using kubectl / Helm
- Automated tests & rollback
7. Which deployment strategies are supported in GKE?
Answer:
- Rolling updates
- Blue-Green deployments
- Canary deployments
- Recreate strategy
Best Practice: Canary + traffic splitting using Istio.
8. How does GKE handle automated rollbacks?
Answer:
- Kubernetes Deployment maintains revision history
kubectl rollout undorestores previous version- Helm supports versioned rollbacks
- Health checks trigger rollback in CI/CD
9. How do you monitor applications running on GKE?
Answer:
- Cloud Monitoring (metrics)
- Cloud Logging (logs)
- Prometheus (custom metrics)
- Grafana dashboards
10. How do you configure alerting for GKE workloads?
Answer:
- Create alert policies in Cloud Monitoring
- Trigger alerts based on:
- CPU/memory
- Pod restarts
- HTTP error rates
- Integrate with email, Slack, PagerDuty
11. What is Error Budget and how is it applied in GKE?
Answer:
Error Budget = 100% – SLO
Used to:
- Decide deployment frequency
- Pause releases during instability
- Balance innovation vs reliability
12. How does GKE help with cost optimization?
Answer:
- Cluster Autoscaler
- Node auto-provisioning
- Preemptible VMs
- Autopilot mode
- Rightsizing resource requests
13. How do you secure workloads in GKE?
Answer:
- RBAC & IAM
- Workload Identity
- Network Policies
- Private clusters
- Binary Authorization
14. What is Binary Authorization and why is it important?
Answer:
Binary Authorization ensures only trusted, signed container images can be deployed to GKE—critical for:
- Supply chain security
- Compliance
- Zero-trust environments
15. How does GKE handle secrets securely?
Answer:
- Kubernetes Secrets
- Secret Manager integration
- Workload Identity access
- Encrypted at rest & in transit
16. What happens during a GKE node upgrade?
Answer:
- Nodes are drained gracefully
- Pods rescheduled on new nodes
- Surge upgrades prevent downtime
- PDBs maintain availability
17. How do you minimize downtime during GKE upgrades?
Answer:
- Enable surge upgrades
- Use PodDisruptionBudgets
- Run multiple replicas
- Test upgrades in staging
18. How do you handle incidents in GKE?
Answer:
- Alerts triggered via Monitoring
- Analyze logs & metrics
- Rollback or scale workloads
- Perform post-incident review (PIR)
19. How does GKE support disaster recovery?
Answer:
- Multi-region clusters
- Global Load Balancer
- Backup tools (Velero)
- Stateless app design
20. How do you implement observability in GKE?
Answer:
- Metrics (CPU, latency, errors)
- Logs (application & system)
- Traces (Cloud Trace)
- Dashboards for SRE insights
21. What is the difference between Autopilot and Standard for DevOps?
Answer:
- Autopilot: Less ops, more reliability
- Standard: More control, complex tuning
DevOps exam expects understanding of trade-offs.
22. How does GKE support compliance and auditing?
Answer:
- Cloud Audit Logs
- IAM policy logs
- CIS benchmark support
- Shielded nodes
23. How do you enforce least-privilege access in GKE?
Answer:
- Use Kubernetes RBAC
- Separate service accounts
- Fine-grained IAM roles
- Namespace isolation
24. How do you test reliability in GKE?
Answer:
- Load testing
- Chaos testing (node failures)
- Simulate traffic spikes
- Validate auto-scaling behavior
25. Most important GKE best practices for the exam?
Answer:
- Think SRE first
- Prefer automation over manual fixes
- Design for failure
- Monitor everything
- Secure by default
Final Exam Tip 
The Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam tests:
“How well you design reliable, observable, secure, and automated systems on GKE — not just Kubernetes commands.”
Conclusion
This GKE Certification Q&A guide prepares you for real exam scenarios and production decisions expected from a Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer.
For more GKE labs, CI/CD pipelines, and certification guides, visit
www.cloudsoftsol.com
