Google PCA Practice Test 28 — 15 Questions

Question 1

An organization wants to implement a change management strategy for a microservices application on GKE, allowing gradual rollouts and immediate rollback if issues arise. Which three practices should they adopt? (Choose three.)

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

Question 2

You need to enable high availability for a new Cloud SQL for MySQL instance. Which TWO configurations must you set? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Enable automatic backups. To enable HA for Cloud SQL, you must create a regional instance (which automatically provisions a standby in a different zone) and ensure automatic backups are enabled (required for failover and PITR). Read replicas are for read scaling, not HA. Binary logging is for replication and PITR, but it is enabled by default for HA instances. Database flags are not required for HA.

Answer

Set the 'cloudsql.mysql' database flag for HA

Answer

Create a read replica in a different region

Answer

Enable binary logging

Question 3

Your team uses a GKE cluster with Autopilot mode. You want to ensure that your workloads can tolerate a node failure without manual intervention. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Configure a PodDisruptionBudget and deploy multiple replicas of your pods across different nodes. GKE Autopilot automatically manages nodes and provides workload-level SLAs. By setting the pod's 'disruption budget' and ensuring replicas are distributed across nodes (which Autopilot does by default), the cluster will automatically reschedule pods if a node fails. No manual node management is required.

Answer

Enable cluster multi-zonal and set pod anti-affinity rules

Answer

Create a node pool with multiple zones and enable cluster autoscaling

Answer

Use StatefulSets with persistent volumes that are replicated across zones

Question 4

Your company uses Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration to achieve 99.999% availability. You need to understand the impact of a regional failure on read and write availability. Which statement is correct?

Accepted Answer

Writes are unavailable if the region containing the leader replica fails, but reads remain available. Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations use a voting protocol. For read-write operations, a majority of replicas must be available. If one region fails, writes may be impacted if the remaining regions do not have a majority. However, reads can still be served from healthy replicas in other regions (though they may be stale).

Answer

Both reads and writes are fully available as long as at least one region remains healthy

Answer

Reads and writes remain fully available because Cloud Spanner uses synchronous replication across all regions

Answer

Writes are always available, but reads may be unavailable if the region with the closest replica fails

Question 5

You need to automatically roll back a GKE deployment if a new version causes a spike in 5xx errors. The deployment uses a canary strategy with Istio traffic splitting. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Monitoring to watch the canary's error rate and trigger a Cloud Function that updates the Istio VirtualService to route all traffic back to the stable version.. Istio allows traffic splitting between versions. By integrating with Cloud Monitoring, you can create an alert that triggers a rollback via a Cloud Function or through a CI/CD pipeline that monitors the canary's error rate. Istio itself does not have built-in rollback; you need external automation. Cloud Deploy can manage canary with automatic rollback, but the question mentions Istio traffic splitting, so a combination of monitoring and automation is needed.

Answer

Set the canary's traffic weight to 0 in the Istio VirtualService if errors exceed threshold using a Kubernetes Job.

Answer

Use GKE's built-in auto-repair feature to replace unhealthy pods.

Answer

Configure an Istio VirtualService with a retry policy that automatically redirects traffic on errors.

Question 6

Your team is following an incident management process. After resolving a major incident, you are tasked with conducting a postmortem. What is the PRIMARY goal of the postmortem process in Google Cloud's recommended approach?

Accepted Answer

Understand the root cause and implement changes to prevent recurrence. Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach emphasizes blameless postmortems. The primary goal is to learn from the incident and improve the system to prevent recurrence, not to assign blame or track individual performance.

Answer

Document the incident timeline and communicate it to stakeholders

Answer

Calculate the financial impact and bill the responsible team

Answer

Identify the individual responsible for the incident and take corrective action

Question 7

You need to create a Cloud Logging sink that exports logs to a BigQuery dataset for long-term analysis. Which destination type should you specify?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is a supported sink destination. Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and custom HTTP endpoints are also supported, but for analysis in BigQuery, you specify BigQuery as the destination.

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Pub/Sub

Answer

Custom HTTP endpoint

Question 8

A company runs a microservices application on GKE Autopilot. They want to implement canary deployments where a new version of a service receives 10% of traffic. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use a Kubernetes Service with label selectors pointing to two Deployments (stable and canary) and scale the number of replicas to achieve 10% traffic. GKE Autopilot supports canary deployments using Kubernetes native features like multiple Deployments with a Service selector using a common label, and adjusting replica counts to control traffic. Istio or Traffic Director are not required. Cloud Deploy can be used but the simplest approach is to use a single Kubernetes Service with label selectors pointing to both Deployments and scaling replicas.

Answer

Use Istio VirtualService to split traffic between two subsets of the same Service

Answer

Deploy the canary version using a separate Service with a different DNS name and configure the application to split traffic

Answer

Use Cloud Deploy with a rollout strategy that sets traffic percentage to 10% for the canary

Question 9

An organization wants to implement a canary deployment in GKE, directing 5% of traffic to a new version and 95% to the stable version. They want to use Google Cloud's managed service mesh for traffic splitting. Which approach should they use?

Question 10

An engineering team wants to perform load testing on their new microservices-based application deployed on GKE. They need a tool that can simulate thousands of concurrent users, generate detailed performance metrics, and integrate with Cloud Monitoring. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Testing. Cloud Load Testing (formerly known as Cloud Load Testing) is a Google Cloud service that allows you to create load tests with simulated users and integrates with Cloud Monitoring for detailed metrics. Locust is an open-source alternative but lacks native integration with Cloud Monitoring.

Answer

Locust

Answer

Apache JMeter

Answer

gcloud alpha loadtest

Question 11

A company wants to set up automated failover between two on-premises data centers and Google Cloud using Cloud VPN. They require a 99.99% SLA for the VPN connection. What configuration should they use?

Question 12

A DevOps team wants to monitor custom application metrics and set up an alert that triggers when the error rate exceeds 1% over a 5-minute window. Which Cloud Monitoring features should they use?

Question 13

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for their Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database. They need to ensure that they can recover from a regional outage with minimal data loss. Which TWO strategies should they implement? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-region read replica. Cross-region replication (using a read replica in another region) and automated backups with PITR provide regional DR. A failover replica in the same region does not protect against region failure. On-premises backup is not mentioned. Import/export is for migration, not DR.

Answer

Export the database daily to Cloud Storage

Answer

Configure a failover replica in the same region

Answer

Use a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL on-premises backup

Question 14

A company has a Cloud Spanner multi-region configuration serving a global user base. They observe increased latency during regional outages. They want to improve read availability and reduce read latency across regions. Which TWO actions should they take?

Accepted Answer

Configure a multi-region instance with additional read replicas in key regions. Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations (e.g., nam3) provide automatic failover and read replicas. Adding read replicas in multiple regions can reduce read latency. Using leader regions and follower reads can improve read performance. Choosing a configuration with more read-only replicas (like nam3) increases availability. Reducing number of nodes would reduce capacity, not improve latency. Adjusting commit timestamp settings is for write performance, not read availability.

Answer

Adjust the commit timestamp settings for lower latency

Answer

Reduce the number of nodes to decrease latency

Answer

Use a single-region configuration to simplify failover

Question 15

A company uses Cloud Storage to store critical documents. They need to protect against accidental deletion or overwrite of objects, and also retain deleted objects for at least 30 days. Which THREE features should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Object versioning. Object versioning keeps multiple versions of objects, preventing overwrite loss. Object retention policies (retention policy) prevent deletion before a specified duration. Object holds can be applied to individual objects to prevent deletion. Bucket lock is used to make a retention policy permanent, but it's not a separate feature for retention. Lifecycle management is for automating transitions or deletions, not for preventing deletion.

Answer

Bucket lock

Answer

Lifecycle management rules