Question

Difficulty: MediumAssessing and Mitigating Technical Debt in Cloud Architectures

An online streaming catalog platform migrated its metadata ingestion services to Google Cloud using a rapid lift-and-shift strategy. A post-migration architecture review reveals significant operational technical debt: cloud infrastructure is currently managed through unversioned local state files leading to release friction, manual Console changes have introduced configuration drift, and service accounts retain primitive Owner roles across environments. Which TWO actions should the Cloud Architect execute to mitigate this technical debt according to Google Cloud recommended practices? (Select TWO answers.)

  1. Import existing Cloud resources into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and migrate state management to a Cloud Storage remote backend configured with object versioning and state locking.Answer
  2. Audit service account permissions and replace primitive Owner roles with fine-grained predefined or custom roles following the principle of least privilege.Answer
  3. C
    Migrate all simple stateless metadata ingestion services to a multi-zone Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster to enforce container lifecycle governance.
  4. D
    Embed JSON service account key files into application source code repositories to simplify continuous deployment pipeline authentication.

Answer

The Cloud Architect should import existing infrastructure into Infrastructure as Code with a versioned and locked remote Cloud Storage backend, and replace primitive IAM roles on service accounts with fine-grained, least-privilege predefined or custom roles.
Remediating technical debt following GCP best practices requires standardizing infrastructure management using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with a remote, versioned, and locked backend (Cloud Storage) to eliminate drift, while simultaneously replacing high-risk primitive IAM roles with fine-grained least-privilege permissions.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Assess Infrastructure Management and State Governance Debt
Identified that managing resources manually or with unversioned local state files creates deployment instability and configuration drift.
Centralizing IaC state into a Cloud Storage backend with object versioning and state locking ensures team synchronization, prevents drift, and enables rollbacks.
2
Assess Security and Access Governance Technical Debt
Identified that service accounts using primitive Owner roles violate security policy and create high risk exposure.
Replacing primitive roles with specific predefined or fine-grained custom roles satisfies compliance and enforces least privilege access.

Key Concept

Assessing and Mitigating Technical Debt in Cloud Architectures
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