Google PCA Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company has an on-premises data center connected to GCP via Dedicated Interconnect. They run latency-sensitive applications on GCE and use Cloud Storage for backups. The backup traffic is causing congestion on the Interconnect link. How should they optimize costs and performance?

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

Accepted Answer

Route backup traffic through a separate VPN tunnel over the internet to reduce congestion on the Interconnect.. Routing backup traffic over a separate VPN tunnel using the internet offloads non-latency-sensitive backup data from the Dedicated Interconnect link, reducing congestion without incurring additional costs for increased bandwidth. This approach preserves the low-latency path for critical application traffic while using a cost-effective, encrypted internet-based connection for backups, optimizing both performance and cost.

Answer

Increase the Dedicated Interconnect bandwidth to accommodate both traffic types.

Answer

Move backup storage to a different region to reduce data transfer costs.

Answer

Use Cloud Interconnect to connect directly to Cloud Storage for backup traffic.

Question 2

A company wants to provide a private, low-latency connection between their on-premises data center and Google Cloud, with bandwidth up to 10 Gbps and a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% availability. Which TWO connectivity options should they consider?

Accepted Answer

Partner Interconnect. Dedicated Interconnect offers up to 100 Gbps per circuit and a 99.99% SLA. Partner Interconnect also offers 10 Gbps and 99.99% SLA through supported partners. VPN is over the internet, lower bandwidth and no 99.99% SLA. Direct Peering is for Google services, no SLA. Carrier Peering is not a Google Cloud service.

Answer

Direct Peering

Answer

Cloud VPN

Answer

Carrier Peering

Question 3

A company wants to implement a CI/CD pipeline for a Java application that will be deployed to Cloud Run. They use Cloud Build and Artifact Registry. The pipeline must compile the Java code, run unit tests, build a container image, and deploy to Cloud Run. Which THREE steps are required in the cloudbuild.yaml? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Step with image 'docker' and args: ['build', '-t', '...']. To compile Java, use a Maven or Gradle step. Build the image using docker build. Deploy to Cloud Run using gcloud run deploy.

Answer

Step with image 'gcloud' and entrypoint: 'gcloud', args: ['container', 'clusters', 'get-credentials']

Answer

Step with image 'node' and entrypoint: 'npm', args: ['test']

Question 4

A company has a legacy application that runs on a single Compute Engine VM and expects to use a fixed IP address. They want to migrate the VM to a different region with minimal downtime. Which TWO actions should they take?

Accepted Answer

Reserve a static external IP address in the target region. Snapshot the VM disk and create a new VM from the snapshot in the target region. Reserve a static external IP address in the target region to keep the IP fixed. Snapshots are regional, so you can create an instance in another region. Deleting the original VM first would cause downtime. Converting to managed instance group is not necessary for a single VM.

Answer

Use gcloud compute instances move command

Answer

Delete the original VM before creating the new one

Answer

Convert the VM to a managed instance group

Question 5

A GKE cluster has a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) configured for CPU utilization. The pods are not scaling up even though CPU usage is high. What could be the reason?

Accepted Answer

The pods do not have resource requests defined. The HPA may not have permissions to read metrics or the metrics server might be unavailable. Also, the target CPU utilization might be set incorrectly. Another common issue is that the HPA is using the wrong metric or the pod resource requests are not set.

Answer

The cluster autoscaler is disabled

Answer

The HPA is configured with the wrong metric name

Answer

The node pool is out of capacity

Question 6

A Cloud Spanner instance is experiencing high latency for point reads. The instance has 5 nodes and the read throughput is moderate. The table has a primary key with monotonically increasing values. What is the most likely cause and optimization?

Accepted Answer

The primary key design causes hotspotting; use a hash prefix or add a leading random value.. The monotonically increasing primary key causes all writes to be directed to the last tablet (splitting point), creating a hotspot on one node. This hotspot leads to high latency for point reads because that node becomes a bottleneck. Adding a hash prefix or a leading random value distributes writes and reads evenly across all nodes, resolving the hotspotting issue.

Answer

Use interleaved tables to reduce the number of index lookups.

Answer

The instance is underprovisioned; add more nodes.

Answer

The instance has too many nodes causing transaction conflicts; reduce nodes.

Question 7

A company runs a batch processing workload on Compute Engine instances that read from Cloud Storage and write results to BigQuery. The instances are launched via a managed instance group (MIG) and each job takes about 30 minutes. The company wants to reduce costs without sacrificing performance. What is the most cost-effective way to provision these instances?

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs are up to 80% cheaper than regular VMs and are ideal for batch workloads that can tolerate interruptions. The job can be designed to checkpoint progress and restart on a new VM if preempted. Regular VMs are more expensive, sole-tenant nodes are for isolation requirements, and CUDs offer discounts for committed use but may not be as cost-effective for short-lived batch jobs.

Answer

Use sole-tenant nodes

Answer

Use standard (on-demand) VMs

Answer

Use committed use discounts (CUDs) with 1-year commitment

Question 8

An organization requires that only container images signed by a trusted authority can be deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Which Google Cloud service should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Binary Authorization. Binary Authorization enforces deploy-time policies based on attestations from trusted authorities. It ensures only signed images are deployed to GKE. Artifact Registry stores images, Secret Manager manages secrets, and Cloud Deploy handles deployments but does not enforce image signing.

Answer

Artifact Registry

Answer

Secret Manager

Answer

Cloud Deploy

Question 9

A company wants to automate the creation and management of Google Cloud resources using an infrastructure-as-code tool that supports configuration drift detection and is Google Cloud-native. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Deployment Manager. Cloud Deployment Manager is Google Cloud's native infrastructure-as-code service that supports YAML, Python, and Jinja templates and can detect configuration drift.

Answer

Terraform

Answer

Cloud SDK

Answer

Cloud Build

Question 10

A team is deploying a stateful application on GKE. They want to ensure that the application's pods are distributed across different zones for high availability and that during cluster upgrades, at least one pod remains available. Which THREE features should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Pod topology spread constraints. Pod topology spread constraints distribute pods across zones. PodDisruptionBudget ensures minimum available pods during voluntary disruptions. Cluster autoscaler is not directly for availability, but for scaling nodes. StatefulSet is for stateful workloads but doesn't guarantee zone distribution without constraints.

Answer

Cluster autoscaler

Answer

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

Question 11

A financial services company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL for a critical application. They need zero downtime during maintenance and automatic failover across zones. They configured a Cloud SQL instance with high availability (HA). During a recent regional outage, the application experienced 10 minutes of downtime. What should they add to improve availability?

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-region replica and promote on failure.. A cross-region replica provides a read-replica in a different region that can be promoted to a primary instance during a regional outage, enabling recovery with minimal downtime. This addresses the scenario where a single-region HA configuration (which uses zonal redundancy within the same region) cannot survive a full regional outage, as occurred in the question. Promoting the replica is a manual or automated failover action that restores write capability in the secondary region, reducing downtime from 10 minutes to seconds or minutes depending on replication lag.

Answer

Configure a warm standby instance in another region using migration.

Answer

Use Cloud SQL Proxy with multiple endpoints.

Answer

Enable database flags for faster failover detection.

Question 12

A company wants to automatically apply security patches to Compute Engine instances running Windows Server. They need a solution that can schedule patch installations and report compliance. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

OS Config. OS Config’s patch management feature allows scheduling and monitoring of OS patches across VM instances.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Answer

Cloud Deploy

Answer

Cloud Build

Question 13

A team wants to deploy a microservice on Cloud Run that needs to access a Cloud Memorystore for Redis instance in the same region. The Redis instance is in a VPC network. Which configuration is required for Cloud Run to reach the Redis instance?

Accepted Answer

Create a Serverless VPC Access connector and configure Cloud Run to use it. Cloud Run services can connect to a VPC using a Serverless VPC Access connector, which provides private network access.

Answer

Configure a Cloud NAT gateway

Answer

Use Private Google Access

Answer

Deploy Cloud Run within a VPC

Question 14

An organization runs a Cloud Run service that processes incoming HTTP requests. Under heavy load, some requests timeout. The team wants to reduce cold starts and ensure consistent performance. They set min instances to 1, but the issue persists. Which additional configuration should they change?

Accepted Answer

Set CPU always allocated to true. Increasing CPU allocation ensures that even idle instances have CPU, reducing latency for incoming requests.

Answer

Reduce concurrency

Answer

Increase max instances

Answer

Increase request timeout

Question 15

A company wants to deploy a microservice on Cloud Run that requires high throughput and low latency. The service processes requests that can spike unpredictably. The team wants to minimize cold starts and ensure availability during traffic bursts. Which combination of Cloud Run settings should they configure?

Accepted Answer

min-instances = 1, max-instances = 100, concurrency = 80. Setting min instances to 1 ensures at least one instance is always warm, eliminating cold starts. Max instances should be high to handle bursts. Concurrency should be set to the maximum the container can handle to maximize throughput.

Answer

min-instances = 1, max-instances = 1, concurrency = 80

Answer

min-instances = 0, max-instances = 100, concurrency = 1

Answer

min-instances = 0, max-instances = 10, concurrency = 80