Google Updated Associate-Cloud-Engineer Exam Questions and Answers by selina

Keyword need to look for

- "High Throughput",

- "Consistent",

- "Property based data insert/fetch like ngine status, distance traveled, fuel level, and more." which can be designed in column,

- "Large Scale Customer Base + Each Customer has multiple sensor which send event in seconds" This will go for pera bytes situation,

- Export data based on the time of the event.

- Atomic

o BigTable will fit all requirement.

o DataStore is not fully Atomic

o CloudStorage is not a option where we can export data based on time of event. We need another solution to do that

o FireStore can be used with MobileSDK.

Comprehensive and Detailed In Depth Explanation:

The core requirements are secure access to a specific BigQuery dataset from a Compute Engine instance, using short-lived credentials, adhering to Google's best practices, and minimizing operational overhead.

A. Project-level IAM role: Granting the BigQuery Data Viewer role at the project level gives the service account broad access to all BigQuery datasets within that project. This violates the principle of least privilege, a fundamental security best practice, as the application should only have access to the designated dataset.

B. Hourly new service account with dataset-level role: While this aims to achieve short-lived credentials, the operational burden of creating, attaching, and managing IAM policies for a new service account every hour is significant and not a Google-recommended practice for routine access. It introduces unnecessary complexity and potential for errors.

C. Custom service account with dataset-level IAM role: This is the recommended and most efficient approach. You create a dedicated Google Cloud service account specifically for this application. You then grant this service account the necessary IAM role (e.g., BigQuery Data Viewer, or a more specific custom role) directly on the target BigQuery dataset. When the Compute Engine instance runs as this service account, the Google Cloud client libraries automatically handle the acquisition and rotation of short-lived OAuth 2.0 access tokens from the instance's metadata server. This eliminates the need to manage long-lived credentials (like service account keys) and ensures the application only has access to the intended dataset. This adheres to the principle of least privilege and minimizes operational costs.

D. Hourly new service account with project-level role: This option combines the high operational overhead of frequently creating new service accounts with the security risk of granting overly permissive project-level access. It is not a recommended practice.

Therefore, the most secure, cost-effective, and operationally efficient solution is to create a custom service account, attach it to the Compute Engine instance, and grant it the appropriate BigQuery IAM role specifically on the target dataset. The platform handles the short-lived credentials automatically.

Google Cloud Documentation References:

Creating and enabling service accounts for instances: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/access/create-enable-service-accounts-for-instances - Explains how to create and associate service accounts with Compute Engine VMs.  

Granting, changing, and revoking access to resources: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/granting-changing-revoking-access - Details how to manage IAM policies and grant roles to service accounts on specific resources (like BigQuery datasets).  

BigQuery IAM roles: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/control-access - Provides information on the various IAM roles available for controlling access to BigQuery resources at different levels (project, dataset, table, etc.).

Best practices for using service accounts: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/best-practices-for-using-service-accounts - Emphasizes the importance of the principle of least privilege and avoiding the management of long-lived service account keys when possible (relying on the metadata server for short-lived tokens).

https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/organization-policy/org-policy-constraints This list constraint defines the set of domains that email addresses added to Essential Contacts can have. By default, email addresses with any domain can be added to Essential Contacts. The allowed/denied list must specify one or more domains of the form @example.com. If this constraint is active and configured with allowed values, only email addresses with a suffix matching one of the entries from the list of allowed domains can be added in Essential Contacts. This constraint has no effect on updating or removing existing contacts. constraints/essentialcontacts.allowedContactDomains