Google PCA Practice Test 10 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A global gaming company deploys a leaderboard service using Cloud Spanner with a single-region configuration. They need a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 seconds and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 minute in the event of a regional outage. What should they do?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Deploy Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration.. Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations provide automatic synchronous replication across regions, achieving RPO of near zero seconds and RTO of minutes (failover is automatic). Single-region does not provide cross-region failover. Multi-region is required for such low RPO/RTO. Backups are point-in-time and slower to restore. Compute Engine is irrelevant.

Answer

Set up a cross-region read replica using Cloud SQL.

Answer

Use Compute Engine instances in multiple zones with a global load balancer to replicate data.

Answer

Configure cross-region backups with a 5-second recovery window.

Question 2

Your team uses Cloud Deploy to manage canary deployments on GKE. You want to automatically roll back a release if the error rate increases by more than 5% within 10 minutes after the canary receives 10% of traffic. Which approach meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use the Cloud Deploy rollout strategy with a canary phase and set the 'failurePolicy' to 'ROLLBACK' with a metric threshold.. Cloud Deploy supports canary deployments with automatic rollback based on Cloud Monitoring metrics. You can define a rollout strategy with a canary phase and attach an alert policy that triggers a rollback. Cloud Deploy integrates with Cloud Monitoring to watch metrics. Manual verification or Cloud Build does not provide automatic rollback based on metrics.

Answer

Configure a Cloud Build trigger to run a script that checks logs and rolls back if error rate exceeds threshold.

Answer

Set up a Cloud Monitoring alert with a notification to the SRE team and have them manually roll back.

Answer

Use GKE blue-green deployment with a manual verification step before switching traffic.

Question 3

An organization wants to deploy a containerized microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and minimize operational overhead. They do not need to manage the node infrastructure and are willing to accept some limitations on node configuration. Which GKE mode should they choose?

Accepted Answer

GKE Autopilot mode. GKE Autopilot is a fully managed mode where Google manages the entire cluster infrastructure, including nodes. It abstracts away node management and automatically provisions, scales, and upgrades nodes. Standard mode requires manual node pool management. Cloud Run is serverless but not Kubernetes. Compute Engine is not container orchestration.

Answer

GKE Standard mode with zonal cluster

Answer

Compute Engine with container-optimized OS and instance groups

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos

Question 4

A startup wants to deploy a containerized web application with zero server management and automatic scaling based on HTTP requests. They expect very low traffic initially but want to scale to thousands of requests per second without configuration changes. Which compute service is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that automatically scales to zero when not in use and scales up to handle traffic spikes, ideal for containerized apps with variable traffic.

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard

Answer

App Engine Standard

Question 5

A company needs to connect their on-premises data center to Google Cloud with a dedicated, low-latency connection that provides a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% uptime. They anticipate high bandwidth usage (10 Gbps). Which connectivity option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Interconnect. Dedicated Interconnect provides a direct physical connection between on-premises and GCP, offers up to 10 Gbps per circuit, and comes with a 99.99% SLA when configured with redundant connections.

Answer

Cloud VPN with static routing

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

Partner Interconnect

Question 6

A company is running a stateful application on Compute Engine with local SSDs for low-latency writes. They want to perform a rolling update without losing data stored on the local SSDs. Which strategy is MOST appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the application to use persistent disks for data storage, then perform rolling updates.. Local SSDs are ephemeral; data is lost when the instance stops. To persist data, use persistent disks or migrate data to a persistent disk first. Rolling updates with local SSDs will lose data on terminated instances. The best approach is to change the application to use persistent disks, which survive instance termination.

Answer

Perform a rolling update using a managed instance group with a canary target; data on local SSDs will be preserved because the instance is only updated.

Answer

Use a stateful managed instance group with preserved local SSDs.

Answer

Snapshot the local SSDs before the update and restore after each instance update.

Question 7

A startup wants to deploy a containerized application with minimal operational overhead. They expect variable traffic. Which compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is the correct choice because it is a fully managed serverless compute platform that automatically scales from zero based on traffic, charges only for resources used during request processing, and eliminates all infrastructure management. This aligns perfectly with the startup's requirement for minimal operational overhead and handling variable traffic patterns without provisioning or scaling concerns.

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Answer

Compute Engine single VM

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Question 8

A DevOps team is building a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine. They want to ensure that each microservice can be deployed independently without affecting other services. Which strategy should they use?

Accepted Answer

Implement canary deployments with a service mesh such as Istio and use separate Cloud Build triggers per microservice.. It combines canary deployments with a service mesh (Istio) to gradually shift traffic to a new version of a single microservice, ensuring independent deployment without impacting other services. Separate Cloud Build triggers per microservice allow each service to be built and deployed independently, aligning with the microservices architecture's requirement for decoupled release cycles.

Answer

Use blue/green deployments with a global load balancer to switch traffic.

Answer

Use Cloud Deploy with rollout strategies and keep all microservices in the same GKE namespace.

Answer

Create a single monolithic pipeline that deploys all microservices simultaneously.

Question 9

A company is using Cloud NAT to allow private instances to access the internet. They notice that outbound connections are failing intermittently. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The number of concurrent connections exceeds the Cloud NAT source port capacity for the assigned NAT IPs.. Cloud NAT uses source network address translation (SNAT) to map private instance IPs to a single public IP address. Each NAT IP has a limited pool of source ports (typically 64,512 per IP for TCP/UDP). When concurrent connections exceed this capacity, new outbound connections are dropped, causing intermittent failures. This is the most likely cause given the symptom of intermittent failures.

Answer

The private instances are using the wrong DNS server.

Answer

The VPC firewall rules are blocking egress traffic.

Answer

Cloud NAT does not support TCP connections.

Question 10

Which TWO statements about Google Cloud VPC firewall rules are correct? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Firewall rules allow you to specify both source and destination IP ranges.. Google Cloud VPC firewall rules are stateful and allow you to specify both source and destination IP ranges in a single rule. This enables granular control over traffic direction, such as allowing ingress from a specific source CIDR to a specific destination CIDR within the VPC.

Answer

Firewall rules are stateless and require explicit rules for return traffic.

Answer

Default VPC has firewall rules that block all ingress traffic.

Answer

Firewall rules cannot be applied to instances by service account.