Chapter 5 of 5 · Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
Optimizing performance and cost
APM, Active Assist recommenders, Spot VMs, committed use discounts and workload costs.
- 2topics
- 9 minfast track
- 12%of the exam
Topics in this chapter
Take them in order, or jump to the one you need.
- 1Application Performance Monitoring and Active Assist RecommendationsCollect performance data with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler, and act on Active Assist insights, recommenders…4 min
- 2FinOps: Spot VMs, Discounts, Network Tiers and Workload Cost TuningApply FinOps on Google Cloud: observability costs, Spot VMs, rightsizing, committed and sustained use discounts, network tiers…5 min
About this chapter
What this chapter covers
Optimizing performance and cost is about 12% of the Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam. It is the smallest section, but cost and performance trade-offs also appear inside questions from every other section.
It covers collecting performance information (application performance monitoring with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler, and Active Assist insights and recommendations) and FinOps practices (observability costs, Spot VMs, rightsizing and resource efficiency, cost planning with committed use discounts, sustained use discounts and network tiers, Google Cloud recommenders, and cost optimization for GKE, Cloud Run and Compute Engine).
The exam has 50 to 60 multiple choice and multiple select questions in 2 hours. Questions here usually describe a workload pattern, such as steady, spiky or interruptible, and ask for the cheapest option that still meets its requirements, ending "What should you do?".
How the topics fit together
You cannot optimize what you do not measure. Recommendations and billing data show where the waste is, and pricing models then match each workload's pattern.
Match the discount to the workload: committed use discounts for steady, always-on usage, Spot VMs for fault-tolerant and interruptible work, autoscaling and scale to zero for spiky demand.
How to use these pages
Each topic page has the same shape, so you can skim for what you need.
- What it is: the idea in plain words.
- How it works: the mechanism, with tables and code examples.
- What to remember for the exam: the facts to memorise and how questions are phrased.
- Common mistakes: the classic traps.
- Check yourself: three questions to test your understanding.
Ready for more practice?
The full Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer question bank has 751 questions, with timed practice exams and an explanation for every answer.
This study guide is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google Cloud. Vendor names, certification names and exam codes are trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification only.