Google PCA Practice Test 4 — 25 Questions

Question 1

A company needs to store petabytes of time-series IoT sensor data and query it with single-digit millisecond latency at millions of reads per second. The data has a simple key-value structure with timestamps. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable. Cloud Bigtable is designed for exactly this use case — petabyte-scale, low-latency (single-digit ms), high-throughput NoSQL storage for time-series, IoT, and financial data. It scales horizontally by adding nodes. BigQuery is optimised for analytics (seconds-to-minutes latency), Cloud SQL is for OLTP (limited to tens of thousands of QPS), and Firestore is for document data with hierarchical structure.

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

BigQuery

Question 2

A team is migrating a stateful application to GKE. The application requires persistent storage with ReadWriteMany (RWX) access across multiple pods. Which Kubernetes volume type should they use to meet this requirement on GKE?

Accepted Answer

Filestore. Filestore provides a managed NFS file share that supports RWX access. GKE can mount Filestore volumes via CSI driver. Persistent Disk supports only ReadWriteOnce (RWO). Cloud Storage FUSE is not a standard Kubernetes volume and does not provide POSIX file system semantics. ConfigMap is for configuration data.

Answer

Persistent Disk (Compute Engine persistent disks)

Answer

Cloud Storage FUSE

Answer

ConfigMap

Question 3

A company wants to deploy a microservices architecture on Google Cloud. They need a service mesh to manage traffic, security, and observability across services. They also want to run workloads on both GKE and Compute Engine. Which solution should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Service Mesh (Anthos Service Mesh). Anthos Service Mesh (based on Istio) provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices across GKE, Compute Engine, and on-premises. Cloud Service Mesh is the same. Istio alone is open-source but not fully managed. Cloud Run for Anthos is for serverless. Traffic Director is for VM-based load balancing but not a full service mesh.

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos

Answer

Istio open-source installation on GKE

Answer

Traffic Director

Question 4

A company is moving a legacy monolithic application to a microservices architecture on Google Cloud. They want to minimize operational overhead and automatically scale each service independently. Which TWO compute services should they consider? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run and GKE Autopilot both offer automatic scaling and reduced operational overhead. Cloud Run is serverless for containers; GKE Autopilot manages the cluster infrastructure. Compute Engine requires manual scaling. Cloud Functions is for functions, not full services. GKE Standard requires node management.

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 5

A company wants to connect their on-premises network to Google Cloud with a dedicated, high-bandwidth, low-latency connection that has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% uptime. Which connectivity option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Cloud Interconnect. Dedicated Cloud Interconnect provides a direct physical connection with high bandwidth, low latency, and a 99.99% SLA. Partner Interconnect uses a third-party provider and has a lower SLA. HA VPN offers 99.99% SLA but lower bandwidth. Classic VPN has no SLA.

Answer

High Availability VPN (HA VPN)

Answer

Partner Cloud Interconnect

Answer

Classic VPN

Question 6

A company has set up an external HTTP(S) load balancer with a backend service pointing to a managed instance group. Some instances are failing health checks. Which TWO actions should the company take to troubleshoot the issue?

Accepted Answer

Ensure the health check path specified in the backend service returns a 200 OK status.. The HTTP(S) load balancer's health check probes the specified path on each backend instance. If the path does not return a 200 OK status, the load balancer marks the instance as unhealthy and stops sending traffic to it. Ensuring the health check path returns a 200 OK is the first step in verifying that the health check is configured correctly.

Answer

Disable session affinity to allow better distribution of traffic.

Answer

Change the health check interval from 5 seconds to 30 seconds.

Answer

Increase the number of instances in the instance group to distribute the load.

Question 7

A company has a global user base and wants to serve static content (images, videos, CSS) with low latency from edge locations. They also want to protect their origin server from traffic spikes. Which combination of services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN with an external HTTP(S) Load Balancer. Cloud CDN caches content at Google's edge locations, providing low-latency delivery and offloading traffic from the origin. HTTP(S) Load Balancer is required to enable Cloud CDN and provides global load balancing and DDoS protection. Cloud Armor adds WAF capabilities but is not required for basic CDN.

Answer

Cloud Armor with Cloud CDN

Answer

Cloud CDN with an internal TCP/UDP load balancer

Answer

Cloud Functions to serve static content

Question 8

A company is migrating a legacy Java application to GCP. The application currently runs on a single on-premises server with a MySQL database. They want to minimize changes to the application code but take advantage of GCP managed services. Which TWO approaches should they consider? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Lift and shift the application to Compute Engine and use Cloud SQL for MySQL.. Lift-and-shift (migrating the application to Compute Engine as-is) and re-platform (using Cloud SQL for MySQL) are the best approaches to minimize code changes. Re-architecting as microservices would require significant code changes. Cloud Functions and Firebase are not suitable for a legacy Java application.

Answer

Use Firebase Realtime Database to replace MySQL.

Answer

Use Cloud Functions to replace the application logic.

Answer

Re-architect the application as a set of microservices on GKE.

Question 9

An engineering team is deploying a microservices application on Google Cloud. They want to use a service mesh for observability, traffic management, and security. They are considering Anthos Service Mesh (ASM). Which THREE components are part of ASM? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Envoy sidecar proxies. ASM uses Istio as the control plane, Envoy as the sidecar proxy, and integrates with Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) for telemetry. GKE is the platform, but not a component of ASM. Cloud Endpoints is a separate API management service.

Answer

Cloud Endpoints

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Question 10

A company wants to save costs on batch-processing workloads that can be interrupted and resumed. The workloads run on Compute Engine VMs and tolerate occasional failures. Which VM pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Spot VMs. Spot VMs (formerly preemptible) offer up to 60-91% discount but can be terminated at any time. They are ideal for fault-tolerant batch jobs. Committed use discounts provide lower prices for 1- or 3-year commitments. Standard VMs are on-demand. The question specifies cost savings and tolerance to interruption.

Answer

Preemptible VMs (with no discount)

Answer

Standard (on-demand) VMs

Answer

Committed use discounts (1-year)

Question 11

An e-commerce company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL to handle user sessions. During Black Friday sales, the database experiences high read latency and connection timeouts. The traffic pattern shows 95% read operations and 5% write operations. They need to improve read performance without significant architectural changes. Which action should they take?

Accepted Answer

Add Cloud SQL read replicas and configure the application to use them for read operations.. Adding read replicas offloads read traffic from the primary instance, improving read latency and reducing connection timeouts. Read replicas are easy to configure and cost-effective.

Answer

Enable Cloud SQL Proxy to reduce connection overhead.

Answer

Migrate from Cloud SQL to Cloud Spanner for better scalability.

Answer

Enable automatic storage increases and increase the machine type of the primary instance.

Question 12

A cloud architect is designing a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application. Each service is deployed to Cloud Run. They want to use Cloud Build to automate building and deploying services only when changes occur in their respective directories. Which Cloud Build feature should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Build triggers with included files filter. Cloud Build triggers can be configured with regular expressions to match changed files in specific directories, so builds are only started for relevant changes. Build steps define actions but not triggers; cloudbuild.yaml is the build configuration file; Artifact Registry is a storage service.

Answer

Build steps in cloudbuild.yaml

Answer

Cloud Build's 'includedFiles' option in the build configuration

Answer

Artifact Registry triggers

Question 13

A company wants to migrate an on-premises MySQL database to GCP with minimal downtime and support for automated failover in case of a zone outage. Which GCP service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL. Cloud SQL for MySQL provides managed MySQL with zone-level high availability via a standby instance in a different zone. Automated failover is built-in. Bigtable and Firestore are NoSQL databases, and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL is not MySQL.

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Firestore

Question 14

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to minimise changes while taking advantage of cloud benefits. Which TWO migration strategies are most appropriate? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Lift-and-shift (rehost) to Compute Engine. Lift-and-shift (rehost) moves the application as-is with minimal changes. Replatform makes limited adjustments (e.g., using a managed database) without changing the core architecture. Both reduce risk and effort compared to re-architecting.

Answer

Re-architect (refactor) into microservices

Answer

Retire the application

Answer

Replace (repurchase) with SaaS

Question 15

A company needs to connect their on-premises data center to Google Cloud with a dedicated, low-latency, and highly available connection. They require at least 10 Gbps throughput and want to avoid internet-based VPN. Which connectivity option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Cloud Interconnect. Dedicated Cloud Interconnect provides a direct physical connection between on-premises and Google Cloud, offering high throughput (10 Gbps or more), low latency, and high availability. Partner Interconnect uses a third-party provider, introducing potential latency. HA VPN uses the internet but can be high availability; still internet-based. Classic VPN is a single tunnel with lower reliability.

Answer

Partner Cloud Interconnect

Answer

Classic VPN

Answer

HA VPN

Question 16

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?

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 17

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 18

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 19

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 20

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