GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Your company has dozens of Compute Engine virtual machines across multiple zones. For a maintenance report, you must quickly display only those VMs that

reside in zone us-central1-b,
have names that start with "web-", and
are currently in the RUNNING state. Which gcloud command meets all of these requirements in a single invocation?

gcloud compute instances list --filter="zone:us-central1-b AND name~'^web-' AND status=RUNNING"
gcloud compute instances list --zones us-central1-b --filter="name=web-* AND status=RUNNING"
gcloud compute instances list --filter="name ('web-*') AND zone=us-central1-b AND status:RUNNING"
gcloud compute instances list --filter="labels.name=web-* AND zone~us-central1-b AND status!=TERMINATED"

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Answer Description

The gcloud compute instances list command supports an advanced --filter flag that accepts logical expressions on resource fields. A valid expression can combine multiple comparisons with the AND keyword:

zone:us-central1-b restricts results to instances whose zone string contains us-central1-b.
name~'^web-' uses the regular-expression operator (~) to match any instance name that begins with the literal characters web-.
status=RUNNING limits the list to VMs whose lifecycle status field equals RUNNING. Putting the three comparisons together with AND ensures that only running web-* instances in the specified zone are returned. The other commands are incorrect because they either use the wrong flag name for zone, misuse the filter grammar (such as the wildcard operator without =~ or ~), or separate the zone restriction from the filter, resulting in an incomplete or syntactically invalid filter.

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