Google Cloud Platform resources are managed hierarchically using organization, folders, and projects. When Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies exist at these different levels, what is the effective policy at a particular node of the hierarchy?

For this question, refer to the Helicopter Racing League (HRL) case study. A recent finance audit of cloud infrastructure noted an exceptionally high number of Compute Engine instances are allocated to do video encoding and transcoding. You suspect that these Virtual Machines are zombie machines that were not deleted after their workloads completed. You need to quickly get a list of which VM instances are idle. What should you do?

Your operations team has asked you to help diagnose a performance issue in a production application that runs on Compute Engine. The application is dropping requests that reach it when under heavy load. The process list for affected instances shows a single application process that is consuming all available CPU, and autoscaling has reached the upper limit of instances. There is no abnormal load on any other related systems, including the database. You want to allow production traffic to be served again as quickly as possible. Which action should you recommend?

For this question, refer to the Mountkirk Games case study.
Mountkirk Games has deployed their new backend on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You want to create a thorough testing process for new versions of the backend before they are released to the public. You want the testing environment to scale in an economical way.
How should you design the process?

You want to optimize the performance of an accurate, real-time, weather-charting application. The data comes from 50,000 sensors sending 10 readings a second, in the format of a timestamp and sensor reading. Where should you store the data?