GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Using the Cloud SDK component manager to install kubectl guarantees that the kubectl binary is kept at the same release level as gcloud when the SDK is updated, removing manual version tracking. Authenticating once with gcloud auth activate-service-account stores short-lived OAuth tokens for the service account, and gcloud container clusters get-credentials writes the correct cluster endpoint and a token-based user entry to kubeconfig without embedding static user credentials. This fulfils the alignment, non-interactive authentication, and automatic configuration goals. Installing kubectl from an external package repository, downloading the standalone binary, or relying on Cloud Shell would either break version parity, still require manual kubeconfig editing, or not run inside the build worker VM.