25 Easy GCP Interview Questions and Answers for Beginners (2025)
Last updated: September 2025
Are you preparing for a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) interview and just starting your cloud journey? If yes, this list of easy GCP interview questions and answers will help you build a solid foundation.
We’ll cover interview questions on commonly used services in GCP such as Compute Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, IAM, and Kubernetes (GKE)—all explained in simple, beginner-friendly terms.
Easy GCP Interview Questions
1. What is Google Compute Engine?
Answer: Compute Engine is GCP’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google’s infrastructure.
Explanation: It allows you to run scalable applications and workloads with customizable VM instances.
2. What are the main storage classes available in Google Cloud Storage?
Answer: Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive.
Explanation: Each class has different cost and availability; choosing the right one optimizes cost and performance.
3. What is BigQuery used for?
Answer: BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse that runs SQL queries on large datasets.
Explanation: It simplifies big data analytics without infrastructure management.
4. Explain what Pub/Sub is in GCP.
Answer: Pub/Sub is a messaging service for asynchronous communication between applications.
Explanation: It decouples services and enables scalable event-driven architectures.
5. What is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in GCP?
Answer: A VPC is a logically isolated network with subnets, IP ranges, and firewall rules.
Explanation: It ensures secure communication and traffic management between cloud resources.
6. What is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)?
Answer: GKE is a managed Kubernetes service for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.
Explanation: It abstracts infrastructure so you can focus on application development.
7. What is IAM in Google Cloud?
Answer: IAM (Identity and Access Management) defines who has access to which resources and what actions they can perform.
Explanation: It ensures security and compliance in cloud environments.
8. What are Cloud Functions?
Answer: Event-driven, serverless compute functions that run in response to triggers.
Explanation: They enable rapid development of scalable functions without managing servers.
9. What is Cloud SQL?
Answer: Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.
Explanation: It handles backups, replication, and patch management automatically.
10. What is the difference between Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL?
Answer: Cloud Storage is object storage for unstructured data; Cloud SQL is a relational database for structured data.
Explanation: Choose storage type based on data structure and access patterns.
11. What is Cloud Run?
Answer: Cloud Run is a serverless platform to run containerized applications.
Explanation: It scales automatically and allows you to run any language inside containers.
12. What is the difference between Cloud Functions and Cloud Run?
Answer: Cloud Functions are event-driven, lightweight functions; Cloud Run runs containerized applications.
Explanation: Cloud Run is better for longer-running or complex apps.
13. What is a service account in GCP?
Answer: A service account is a special account used by applications to access GCP services securely.
Explanation: It allows fine-grained control over programmatic access to resources.
14. What is Stackdriver / Cloud Monitoring?
Answer: Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver) tracks metrics, logs, and alerts for your GCP resources.
Explanation: It helps detect and fix performance issues quickly.
15. What is Cloud Scheduler?
Answer: Cloud Scheduler is a fully managed cron job service to trigger tasks on a schedule.
Explanation: Useful for automating tasks like batch jobs or API calls.
16. What is a snapshot in Compute Engine?
Answer: A snapshot is a point-in-time backup of a disk.
Explanation: Snapshots allow you to restore VMs or disks if something goes wrong.
17. What is Cloud Endpoints?
Answer: Cloud Endpoints is an API management service for deploying and securing APIs.
Explanation: It provides authentication, monitoring, and logging for APIs.
18. What is Cloud CDN?
Answer: Cloud CDN caches content at Google’s edge locations for faster delivery to users.
Explanation: It reduces latency and improves website performance globally.
19. What is Cloud Logging?
Answer: Cloud Logging collects and stores logs from GCP resources and applications.
Explanation: Helps in monitoring, debugging, and auditing activities.
20. What is Cloud Trace?
Answer: Cloud Trace records latency data for your applications.
Explanation: It helps identify performance bottlenecks in distributed systems.
🚀 Pro Tip: These 25+ questions are a great starting point, but real interviews often throw surprises. You can generate custom interview questions on GCP (or any topic) instantly with 👉 PrepKraft’s AI Interview Questions Generator.
21. What is BigQuery ML?
Answer: BigQuery ML allows you to create and run machine learning models using SQL.
Explanation: You can build ML models directly on your datasets without moving data.
22. What is App Engine Standard vs Flexible?
Answer:
- Standard: Runs apps in sandboxed environments with fast scaling.
- Flexible: Runs apps in containers, supports custom runtimes.
Explanation: Standard is simpler for common languages; Flexible is better for custom or legacy apps.
23. What is Cloud Tasks?
Answer: Cloud Tasks manages the execution, dispatch, and delivery of large numbers of distributed tasks asynchronously.
Explanation: Useful for decoupling workloads and controlling execution rates.
24. What is Cloud Armor?
Answer: Cloud Armor provides DDoS and application security protection for GCP services.
Explanation: Protects apps from attacks and enforces access policies.
25. What is a topic and subscription in Pub/Sub?
Answer:
- Topic: A named resource to which messages are sent.
- Subscription: Receives messages from a topic.
Explanation: Topics and subscriptions are the core building blocks of messaging in Pub/Sub.
Final Thoughts
These 25 easy GCP interview questions are perfect for beginners preparing for cloud roles. Start with these questions to build your foundational knowledge, and then move on to medium and hard questions for more advanced scenarios.
👉 Next steps:
Want to Practice More Interview Questions?
Go beyond these questions and generate unlimited, role-specific interview questions with PrepKraft AI powered interview questions generator.
About the Author
Subodh Gupta is the founder and author of TechnologyBasics.net. With over 20 years of experience in software development and technology leadership at major organizations, including roles in financial technology, he shares practical guides, tutorials, and reviews on essential software, apps, and tech tools. His insights help everyday users make informed decisions and use technology more effectively.