Google PCA Practice Test 21 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a stateful application on a single Compute Engine instance with a persistent disk. They need to ensure that the application can recover quickly in case of a zone failure. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 minutes, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes. Which approach should they take?

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

Accepted Answer

Use a regional persistent disk with the instance, and configure the application to failover to a standby instance in another zone using a startup script that attaches the disk.. A regional persistent disk synchronously replicates data across two zones, ensuring an RPO of zero. By automating failover to a standby instance in the other zone, you can achieve the 15-minute RTO. This is the most suitable solution for a stateful application requiring zone failure recovery. The other options either do not meet the RPO/RTO or require significant application changes.

Answer

Create a snapshot schedule for the persistent disk every 5 minutes, and in case of failure, create a new instance from the latest snapshot in another zone.

Answer

Set up a Cloud SQL instance with high availability, and migrate the application to use Cloud SQL.

Answer

Use a managed instance group with autoscaling across multiple zones, and store application state on a Cloud Storage bucket mounted via Cloud Storage FUSE.

Question 2

A company is migrating on-premises workloads to Google Cloud. They have a critical application that requires consistent low-latency access to a database, with read replicas in multiple regions for disaster recovery. The application is expected to grow by 10x over the next year. Which database service and configuration should the architect choose to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Spanner with multi-region configuration. Cloud Spanner with a multi-region configuration is the correct choice because it provides strong global consistency, low-latency reads and writes across regions, and automatic horizontal scaling to handle a 10x growth in workload. Its multi-region replication ensures synchronous replication for disaster recovery while maintaining ACID transactions, which is critical for a database requiring consistent low-latency access.

Answer

Use Cloud Bigtable with multi-region replication

Answer

Use Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with cross-region read replicas

Answer

Use Firestore in native mode with multi-region location

Question 3

A company uses BigQuery for large-scale analytics. They have a fixed monthly budget and want to ensure predictable costs for query processing, even when many users run concurrent queries. Which BigQuery pricing model should they use?

Accepted Answer

Flat-rate pricing with slot reservations. Flat-rate pricing with slot reservations is correct because it provides a fixed monthly cost for a committed number of slots, making query processing costs predictable regardless of concurrent query volume. This aligns with a fixed budget and many concurrent users, since slots are dedicated capacity rather than per-query billing.

Answer

On-demand pricing with flat-rate discounts

Answer

Autoscaling slot reservations

Answer

On-demand pricing with committed use discounts

Question 4

A company runs a batch analytics job every hour on BigQuery. The job processes terabytes of data and the results are stored in Cloud Storage. The job must complete within 30 minutes. Which TWO actions can reduce query execution time? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Use a partitioned table based on the timestamp column. Option B is correct because partitioning the table on the timestamp column lets BigQuery prune irrelevant partitions, so each hourly run scans only the data for the relevant time range instead of the full multi-terabyte table, dramatically reducing bytes processed and execution time. Option E is correct because increasing the number of BigQuery slots allocated to the project provides more compute capacity (slots) for the query, allowing BigQuery to parallelize the work across more workers and finish the batch job faster. Option A is not reliable here because cached results are invalidated whenever the underlying tables change, and an hourly job over freshly arriving data will almost never hit a valid cache. Option C is wrong because legacy SQL is a deprecated dialect with no performance advantage over GoogleSQL. Option D is wrong because querying data in Cloud Storage via an external table typically performs worse than querying native BigQuery storage, since it lacks BigQuery's columnar storage and optimization.

Answer

Use cached results from the previous run

Answer

Convert the query to use legacy SQL

Answer

Export the data to Cloud Storage and query with an external table

Question 5

A team needs to set up alerting for a production service. They want to receive notifications when the 99th percentile latency exceeds 500ms for 5 minutes. Which two Cloud Monitoring components are required? (Choose two.)

Question 6

Your company runs a stateful application on GKE that stores data in persistent volumes backed by Compute Engine persistent disks. You need to back up the application data and the Kubernetes resource configurations (deployments, services, etc.) for disaster recovery. Which tool should you use?

Accepted Answer

Velero. Velero is the standard open-source tool for backing up and restoring Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. It can snapshot Compute Engine persistent disks and also back up Kubernetes objects like deployments and services, which matches the requirement to protect both application data and resource configurations.

Answer

gcloud container clusters create --async

Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL

Answer

Cloud Storage with object versioning and lifecycle policies

Question 7

A company wants to implement a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for their Cloud SQL for MySQL databases. They need to be able to recover to a specific point in time (within seconds) in case of accidental data deletion. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Enable binary logging (binlog). Option A is correct because Cloud SQL for MySQL point-in-time recovery (PITR) relies on binary logging (binlog) to capture all data changes, allowing recovery to a specific moment within seconds. Option D is correct because automated backups provide the base backup that, combined with binlog, enables PITR; without automated backups enabled, PITR cannot function. Option B is incorrect because a failover replica provides high availability within a region, not point-in-time recovery from accidental deletion. Option C is incorrect because a cross-region read replica is for read scaling and regional DR, not for recovering to a specific point in time. Option E is incorrect because daily exports to Cloud Storage are manual/periodic snapshots and cannot achieve second-level point-in-time recovery.

Answer

Configure a failover replica in another zone

Answer

Create a cross-region read replica

Answer

Export the database daily to Cloud Storage

Question 8

A company hosts a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTP(S) load balancer. They notice that some users experience high latency from certain regions. They want to improve performance without adding complexity. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Enable Cloud CDN. Enabling Cloud CDN caches content at Google's globally distributed edge caches, reducing latency for users in regions far from the origin Compute Engine instances. This directly addresses the high-latency issue without adding complexity, as it requires no changes to the application architecture and is a simple configuration toggle on the load balancer backend bucket or backend service.

Answer

Add more instances in the same region

Answer

Use Premium Tier networking

Answer

Enable Cloud Armor

Question 9

A company wants to run a containerized application that scales down to zero when not in use and only incurs costs when requests are being processed. They do not want to manage infrastructure. Which compute service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that scales to zero and charges only for resources used during request processing. GKE Autopilot manages infrastructure but does not scale to zero (has a minimum node). Cloud Functions scales to zero but is for functions, not containers. Compute Engine always has running VMs.

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard

Question 10

A company runs a service on Cloud Run that needs to access a Cloud SQL instance via private IP. Both are in the same VPC network. The service cannot connect to the database. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run needs a Serverless VPC Access connector.. Cloud Run services run in a Google-managed environment and cannot directly reach resources on a VPC network via private IP. A Serverless VPC Access connector is required to bridge the serverless environment to the VPC, enabling private IP connectivity to Cloud SQL. Without this connector, the Cloud Run service cannot route traffic to the Cloud SQL private IP, even if both are in the same VPC network.

Answer

Cloud Run must be deployed in the same zone as Cloud SQL.

Answer

The IAM permissions for Cloud Run to access Cloud SQL are missing.

Answer

A firewall rule is blocking traffic.

Answer

The Cloud SQL instance needs a public IP assigned.

Question 11

A finance company needs to ensure that all compute instances in their VPC can only communicate with Google APIs (e.g., Cloud Storage) over internal IPs. Additionally, instances without external IPs should be able to access the internet for updates. Which TWO configurations should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Configure Cloud NAT. Option A (Configure Cloud NAT) is correct because Cloud NAT lets instances that have no external IP addresses initiate outbound connections to the internet for updates, while keeping them unreachable from inbound internet traffic. Option C (Enable Private Google Access on the subnet) is correct because it allows instances without external IPs to reach Google APIs and services such as Cloud Storage using internal IP addresses rather than public ones. Together these two settings satisfy both requirements: private access to Google APIs and outbound internet access without external IPs. Option B is not needed because a firewall egress rule to 0.0.0.0/0 only permits traffic and does not by itself provide NAT or a route to the internet for instances lacking external IPs. Option D is wrong because assigning external IPs contradicts the goal of using internal IPs for Google API access and exposes instances to the internet. Option E is wrong because VPC peering connects VPC networks to each other and does not provide access to Google's public APIs or general internet connectivity.

Answer

Create a firewall rule allowing egress to 0.0.0.0/0

Answer

Assign external IPs to all instances

Answer

Use VPC peering with Google's public network

Question 12

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. Option D is correct because a static external IP address is region-scoped in Google Cloud, so to keep the legacy application's fixed IP behavior in the new region, a static external IP must be reserved in the target region and attached to the new VM. Option E is correct because creating a snapshot of the boot disk and then creating a new VM from that snapshot in the target region is the standard way to relocate a single Compute Engine VM's disk and data with minimal downtime. Option A is incorrect because gcloud compute instances move only moves an instance between zones within the same region, not to a different region. Option B is incorrect because deleting the original VM before creating the new one increases downtime and risks losing the working instance. Option C is incorrect because converting to a managed instance group changes the architecture and does not by itself provide a fixed IP or a cross-region migration path.

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 13

A startup is building a serverless application that processes events from Cloud Storage buckets. Each event triggers a Python function that resizes images. Which GCP compute service is MOST suitable for this event-driven workload?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is designed for event-driven, serverless compute. It can be triggered directly by Cloud Storage events (object finalize/create). Cloud Run requires HTTP invocation, App Engine is for web apps, and Compute Engine VMs require management.

Answer

Cloud Run

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

App Engine

Question 14

A company wants to protect their web application hosted on Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer from common web attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Which GCP service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor. Cloud Armor provides WAF (Web Application Firewall) capabilities including preconfigured rules to block OWASP Top 10 attacks like SQL injection and XSS. IAP is for access control, not attack prevention. VPC Service Controls are for data exfiltration prevention. Cloud CDN is for caching content.

Answer

Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

VPC Service Controls

Question 15

Match each GCP data processing service to its use case.

Accepted Answer

Dataflow: Unified stream and batch data processing using Apache Beam. Dataflow is for unified stream/batch processing, Dataproc manages Spark/Hadoop, BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse, Pub/Sub is for messaging. Common confusions include mixing Dataflow with Dataproc and BigQuery with Pub/Sub.

Answer

Dataflow: Managed Spark and Hadoop clusters

Answer

BigQuery: Asynchronous messaging service