Google PCA Practice Test 20 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Refer to the exhibit. What is the primary benefit of the `--preemptible` flag in this command?

Accepted Answer

Significant cost reduction compared to standard instances.. The `--preemptible` flag in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) creates preemptible VM instances, which are short-lived, cost-effective instances that can be terminated at any time by GCP. The primary benefit is a significant cost reduction—up to 60-91% lower than standard instances—making them ideal for batch jobs, fault-tolerant workloads, and non-critical tasks. This flag does not affect startup time, availability guarantees, or provide free access to specialized hardware.

Answer

Faster instance startup time due to optimized kernel.

Answer

Higher availability through automatic restart on failure.

Answer

Access to specialized hardware like GPUs at no extra cost.

Question 2

A company is designing a multi-region architecture for disaster recovery. Their primary region is us-central1 and they want a warm standby in another region. The application runs on Compute Engine with a stateful backend. Which approach minimizes RTO while keeping costs reasonable?

Accepted Answer

Use a managed instance group in the secondary region with persistent disk snapshots and Cloud Load Balancing failover. Option B minimizes RTO by pre-provisioning Compute Engine instances in the secondary region via a managed instance group, using persistent disk snapshots for stateful data. This warm standby approach keeps instances ready to serve traffic with minimal startup delay, while Cloud Load Balancing failover automatically redirects traffic on primary region failure, balancing cost and recovery speed.

Answer

Use Cloud SQL cross-region replication and start Compute Engine instances on failover

Answer

Replicate the application to Cloud Run in the secondary region

Answer

Set up a managed instance group with instance templates in the secondary region without pre-provisioned instances

Question 3

A company is deploying a critical application on Compute Engine with an HTTP load balancer. They want to ensure that if an instance health check fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to healthy instances. Which configuration should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use an HTTP(S) load balancer with a backend service configured with a health check and enable connection draining.. Option A is correct because an HTTP(S) load balancer with a backend service configured with a health check automatically monitors instance health and reroutes traffic away from unhealthy instances. Enabling connection draining ensures that in-flight requests to an unhealthy instance are given time to complete before the instance is removed from the load balancing pool, preventing disruption to active sessions.

Answer

Use an internal load balancer with a backend service configured with a health check.

Answer

Use a network load balancer with a health check configured on the target pool.

Answer

Use an HTTP(S) load balancer with a backend service configured with a health check and enable session affinity.

Answer

Use a TCP proxy load balancer with a backend service configured with a health check.

Question 4

An organization wants to define an SLO for their API hosted on Cloud Endpoints. Which metric should they use as a Service Level Indicator (SLI) for availability?

Accepted Answer

Ratio of HTTP 200 responses to total requests. For an availability SLO, the SLI must measure the proportion of successful requests. In Cloud Endpoints, availability is defined as the ratio of successful (HTTP 200) responses to total requests, as this directly reflects whether the API is functioning correctly. Option C is correct because it captures the fraction of requests that completed without error, which is the standard definition of availability in service-level monitoring.

Answer

Number of HTTP 5xx errors

Answer

Request latency at the 99th percentile

Answer

CPU utilization of backend instances

Question 5

A company uses Cloud Logging to monitor their application logs. They notice that some logs from their Compute Engine instances are missing. The instances have the required logging permission. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The logging agent is not configured to send logs to Cloud Logging.. Compute Engine instances do not automatically send logs to Cloud Logging. They require the Cloud Logging agent (based on fluentd) to be installed and configured to forward logs. Even with correct IAM permissions, without the agent, logs will not be collected. Option B correctly identifies this missing agent as the most likely cause.

Answer

The log sink is not configured correctly.

Answer

The instances are using a custom image without the logging agent.

Answer

The log bucket is in a different project.

Answer

The log entries are being filtered by the exclusion filter.

Question 6

A company uses Cloud NAT to allow private instances to access the internet. They notice intermittent connectivity issues. What should they check first?

Accepted Answer

Cloud NAT gateway has at least one NAT IP address configured.. Intermittent connectivity issues when using Cloud NAT are most commonly caused by a lack of NAT IP addresses. Cloud NAT uses source network address translation (SNAT) to map private instance traffic to a public IP address; if the gateway has no NAT IP addresses configured, or if the number of concurrent connections exceeds the available port capacity of the assigned NAT IPs, packets are dropped, leading to intermittent failures. Checking that at least one NAT IP address is assigned is the first and most critical troubleshooting step.

Answer

Cloud NAT router has a configured IP address range.

Answer

Cloud NAT gateway is in the same region as the instances.

Answer

The VPC subnet has private Google access enabled.

Answer

The instances have external IP addresses assigned.

Question 7

Your company runs a stateless web application on Compute Engine. You want to ensure that if a zone fails, the application continues to serve traffic with minimal manual intervention. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.. A regional managed instance group (MIG) distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining zones continue serving traffic. Combined with a global Cloud Load Balancer, traffic is automatically routed to healthy instances in any zone, providing high availability with minimal manual intervention. Autoscaling further ensures that new instances are created to handle load, even if a zone becomes unavailable.

Answer

Schedule regular snapshots of each instance's persistent disk to a regional bucket.

Answer

Use a global Cloud Load Balancer and enable Cloud CDN.

Answer

Create an instance template and manually deploy instances in another zone.

Question 8

You are designing a Dataflow streaming pipeline for real-time event processing. The pipeline must be cost-effective while tolerating worker failures without data loss. Which configuration should you use?

Accepted Answer

Use FlexRS with preemptible workers and enable streaming engine.. Option C is correct because FlexRS (Flexible Resource Scheduling) allows you to use preemptible workers in a streaming pipeline, which significantly reduces cost while the Streaming Engine provides durable state storage and checkpointing to tolerate worker failures without data loss. Preemptible workers are cheaper but can be terminated at any time; the Streaming Engine ensures that pipeline state is preserved and processing can resume seamlessly from the last checkpoint.

Answer

Use a batch Dataflow job with preemptible workers.

Answer

Use high-memory machine types for all workers to avoid preemption.

Answer

Use a standard Dataflow job with non-preemptible workers.

Question 9

A company needs to deploy a stateless web application that can handle variable traffic. Which compute option is the most cost-effective and scales automatically?

Accepted Answer

App Engine standard environment with automatic scaling.. App Engine standard environment with automatic scaling is the most cost-effective and automatically scales to zero when there is no traffic, making it ideal for variable traffic stateless web applications. It abstracts infrastructure management, charges only for resources used, and handles scaling instantly without provisioning overhead.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with cluster autoscaling.

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups and autoscaling.

Answer

Compute Engine with preemptible VMs.

Answer

Cloud Run with CPU always allocated.

Question 10

A company uses the above IAM policy on a Cloud Storage bucket. They find that Bob can view objects in the bucket. Which statement explains this?

Accepted Answer

Bob is a member of the group viewers@example.com.. Option D is correct because the IAM policy shown includes a binding that grants the `roles/storage.objectViewer` role to the group `viewers@example.com`. If Bob is a member of that group, he inherits the permissions to view objects in the bucket. The policy explicitly lists this group as a principal, so Bob's ability to view objects is directly explained by his group membership.

Answer

There is a higher-level policy that grants Bob viewer access.

Answer

The etag is mismatched causing policy override.

Answer

The bucket has uniform bucket-level access disabled.

Answer

The objectCreator role implicitly includes read access.

Question 11

A company wants to improve the reliability of their microservices architecture on Google Cloud. Which TWO practices should they implement? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Implement retry with exponential backoff. B is correct because implementing retry with exponential backoff allows transient failures (e.g., network timeouts, temporary service unavailability) to be handled gracefully by automatically retrying the request after increasing delays, reducing load on the recovering service. This pattern is essential in microservices on Google Cloud to improve reliability without overwhelming downstream dependencies.

Answer

Design with a single point of failure for simplicity

Answer

Use synchronous communication between all services

Answer

Disable health checks to reduce latency

Question 12

A company runs a global e-commerce site on GKE. They want to ensure disaster recovery with multi-region deployment. What is the best practice for configuring GKE clusters?

Accepted Answer

Deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions.. For disaster recovery with a multi-region deployment, the best practice is to deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions. This ensures that if an entire region fails, traffic can be redirected to the other region's cluster, providing true geographic redundancy. A single cluster, whether zonal or regional, cannot survive a regional outage because it is bound to a single control plane location.

Answer

Use a single zonal cluster with node auto-repair.

Answer

Deploy a single cluster with multi-master setup.

Answer

Use a single regional cluster with multiple zones.

Question 13

A company uses Cloud Spanner for a global financial application. They need to ensure that a regional outage does not cause data loss. The application requires strong consistency and low latency reads and writes across multiple regions. Which configuration meets the reliability requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use a multi-region Spanner instance with a primary region and two witness regions. Option C is correct because a multi-region Spanner instance with a primary region and two witness regions uses Google's synchronous replication across three regions, ensuring strong consistency and no data loss during a regional outage. Witness regions participate in the Paxos quorum without serving read traffic, guaranteeing that writes are committed in at least two regions before acknowledgment, which meets the requirement for zero data loss and low latency reads and writes.

Answer

Use a multi-region Spanner instance with read replicas in two other regions

Answer

Use a single-region Spanner instance and schedule backups to Cloud Storage

Answer

Use a single-region Spanner instance with point-in-time recovery (PITR) enabled

Question 14

A company has a Spanner instance for global transactions. They need to ensure reliability during a regional outage. What is the best approach?

Accepted Answer

Enable multi-region configuration with read-only replicas.. Spanner's multi-region configuration with read-only replicas provides global transactional consistency and automatic failover without manual intervention. Read-only replicas can serve reads locally and, in the event of a regional outage, one can be promoted to a read-write replica to maintain availability. This approach ensures reliability during a regional outage while preserving Spanner's strong consistency guarantees.

Answer

Spanner is already resilient across zones; use backup/restore for regions.

Answer

Use multiple instances in different regions.

Answer

Enable leader placement option.

Question 15

Your organization uses Cloud SQL for MySQL to host a production database. The database size is 500 GB. You need to create a read replica for reporting purposes. The read replica should be in a different region for disaster recovery. You have created the read replica in the us-west1 region. However, the replication lag is higher than expected, sometimes exceeding 5 minutes. What should you do to reduce replication lag?

Accepted Answer

Upgrade the primary instance to a higher machine type with more CPU and memory.. Option C is correct because replication lag in Cloud SQL for MySQL is often caused by the primary instance being unable to keep up with the write workload, especially when the replica is in a different region. Upgrading the primary to a higher machine type with more CPU and memory increases its capacity to process transactions and generate binary logs, reducing the backlog that causes lag. This directly addresses the root cause of high replication lag, unlike other options that target unrelated aspects.

Answer

Configure an external read replica using MySQL binary log replication.

Answer

Increase the disk size of the read replica.

Answer

Decrease the backup window on the primary instance.

Google PCA Practice Test 20 — 15 Questions

Exhibit

Google PCA Practice Test 20 — 15 Questions

Exhibit