Question

Difficulty: HardAssessing and Mitigating Technical Debt in Cloud Architectures

A smart building management provider on Google Cloud experiences deployment instability and security compliance failures resulting from accrued technical debt. An architecture audit revealed two major issues: infrastructure provisioning relies on local Terraform state files saved on individual engineer workstations without concurrency locking, and application workloads run using the default Compute Engine service account bound to project-level primitive Editor roles. Which TWO architectural remediations should the cloud architect implement to mitigate this technical debt? (Select TWO.)

  1. Migrate state management to a Google Cloud Storage bucket configured with Object Versioning and enable remote backend state locking.Answer
  2. Replace primitive role assignments by creating dedicated user-managed service accounts with predefined or fine-grained custom roles following least privilege.Answer
  3. C
    Commit local Terraform state files directly into the version-controlled application repository to track revision history and resolve state conflicts through merge requests.
  4. D
    Assign developers the Service Account Admin role at the project level to allow workloads to dynamically request elevated privileges at runtime.

Answer

The team should migrate Terraform state files to a Google Cloud Storage bucket configured with Object Versioning and remote backend locking, and replace project-level primitive roles by creating dedicated user-managed service accounts with fine-grained custom or predefined roles.
Migrating Terraform state management to a Cloud Storage bucket with Object Versioning and state locking ensures isolated, atomic state updates without risk of race conditions or data loss. Creating dedicated user-managed service accounts with scoped custom or predefined roles removes over-privileged primitive Editor roles, establishing robust IAM governance.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Assess the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) state management technical debt.
Identify that local unversioned Terraform state files lack locking mechanisms, causing race conditions and configuration drift across engineer environments.
Transitioning to a centralized Google Cloud Storage backend configured with Object Versioning and native locking eliminates concurrent state modification hazards.
2
Assess the Identity and Access Management (IAM) security technical debt.
Identify that workloads running under default service accounts with primitive Editor roles possess broad, unneeded permissions across the Google Cloud project.
Creating dedicated user-managed service accounts bound to specific custom or predefined roles ensures compliance with the principle of least privilege.

Key Concept

Mitigating technical debt by modernizing IaC state backends and enforcing granular IAM least-privilege permissions on Google Cloud.
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