Google PCA Practice Test 31 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a web application on App Engine Standard environment. The application experiences downtime during deployments due to traffic shifting. Which two strategies should they implement to improve reliability? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use traffic splitting to gradually migrate traffic to the new version.. Option C is correct because App Engine's traffic splitting feature allows you to gradually shift traffic from the old version to the new version, minimizing the impact of deployment-related errors or performance issues. This incremental migration reduces the risk of a full outage during deployment and enables quick rollback if problems arise.

Answer

Use Cloud Endpoints to manage API traffic and route deployments.

Answer

Increase the number of idle instances to handle traffic during deployment.

Answer

Set manual scaling to avoid autoscaling delays.

Question 2

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to adopt microservices and improve deployment frequency. Which THREE practices should they adopt? (Choose 3.)

Accepted Answer

Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform.. Option A is correct because Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform enables declarative, version-controlled provisioning of cloud resources. This supports the microservices migration by allowing teams to spin up consistent, repeatable environments for each service, which is essential for increasing deployment frequency without manual configuration errors.

Answer

Build a single deployment pipeline for all services.

Answer

Implement blue/green deployments.

Question 3

Which THREE practices are recommended for organizing projects in a Google Cloud organization?

Accepted Answer

Use a separate project for each environment (e.g., development, staging, production).. Option B is correct because using separate projects for each environment (development, staging, production) enforces resource isolation, prevents accidental cross-environment changes, and allows independent IAM policies, billing, and quotas. This aligns with Google Cloud's recommended resource hierarchy best practices for managing lifecycle and security boundaries.

Answer

Create a separate project to hold organization policies.

Answer

Consolidate all production resources into a single project for simplicity.

Question 4

A financial services company is designing a multi-region application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for high availability. They need to serve user requests from the closest region and automatically failover if a region becomes unavailable. Which architecture should they use?

Accepted Answer

Deploy GKE clusters in multiple regions and use a multicluster ingress with an external HTTP(S) load balancer set up with the global external backend.. Option D is correct because deploying GKE clusters in multiple regions and using a multicluster ingress with a global external HTTP(S) load balancer enables traffic routing to the closest healthy backend cluster based on latency or geography, and automatically fails over to another region if one becomes unavailable. The global external backend configuration allows the load balancer to distribute traffic across multiple regional GKE clusters, providing both proximity-based routing and high availability.

Answer

Use a global external HTTP(S) load balancer with a single backend service pointing to one regional cluster.

Answer

Use Cloud CDN in front of a single regional GKE cluster to cache content.

Answer

Use a single regional GKE cluster with auto-scaling across zones.

Question 5

A company is running a web application on Compute Engine instances that average 20% CPU utilization. They want to reduce costs without impacting performance. What is the most effective action?

Accepted Answer

Rightsize instances to a smaller machine type based on usage metrics.. The instances are averaging only 20% CPU utilization, indicating they are over-provisioned. Rightsizing to a smaller machine type directly reduces the compute cost per instance while maintaining adequate performance for the current workload, as the smaller instance can handle the existing load without degradation.

Answer

Change instance type to e2-standard-4.

Answer

Purchase 3-year committed use discounts.

Answer

Use preemptible instances for all traffic.

Question 6

A multinational e-commerce company needs a globally distributed database that provides strong consistency and transactional support for order processing. Which Google Cloud database service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the correct choice because it is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database service that provides strong consistency and full ACID transactional support across regions. Unlike other Google Cloud databases, Spanner uses synchronous replication and the TrueTime API to guarantee external consistency, making it ideal for order processing systems that require both global scale and transactional integrity.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud Firestore

Question 7

A team deployed a new version of a service on Cloud Run. After deployment, users report 502 errors. The logs show "Error: Server Error" with no stack trace. What is the first step the team should take to diagnose the issue?

Accepted Answer

Check the container image for missing dependencies or misconfiguration.. The 502 error with 'Error: Server Error' and no stack trace typically indicates that the container failed to start or crashed immediately after startup, often due to missing dependencies or misconfiguration in the container image. Cloud Run requires the container to listen on the port specified by the PORT environment variable (default 8080) and respond to health checks; if the container exits or fails to bind, Cloud Run returns a 502. Checking the container image is the first diagnostic step because it addresses the most common root cause before investigating runtime or scaling issues.

Answer

Enable Cloud Debugger to inspect the running instance.

Answer

Increase Cloud Run max instances limit.

Answer

Rollback to the previous version immediately.

Question 8

A company wants to implement a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application on GKE. They require automated canary deployments with gradual traffic shifting and automatic rollback on metric failure. Which Google Cloud service is most suitable?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Deploy with Skaffold.. Cloud Deploy with Skaffold is the most suitable because it provides native support for progressive delivery on GKE, including automated canary deployments with gradual traffic shifting (using Service Mesh or Ingress) and automatic rollback based on Cloud Monitoring metrics. Skaffold handles the build and deploy configuration, while Cloud Deploy manages the rollout pipeline, approval gates, and metric-driven rollback logic without requiring manual intervention.

Answer

Cloud Build with Deployment Manager.

Answer

Spinnaker on GKE.

Answer

Istio with manual traffic management.

Question 9

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.. Option B is correct because 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 10

A company is building a real-time data pipeline that ingests events from IoT devices, processes them with Apache Beam, and stores results in BigQuery for analytics. The pipeline must handle spikes in traffic and guarantee exactly-once processing. Which combination of services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and BigQuery.. Option D is correct because Cloud Pub/Sub provides scalable, asynchronous ingestion for IoT event spikes, Dataflow (which runs Apache Beam) offers exactly-once processing semantics via checkpointing and idempotent sinks, and BigQuery serves as the analytics destination. This combination meets all requirements: Pub/Sub decouples producers from consumers, Dataflow handles stateful processing with exactly-once guarantees, and BigQuery supports real-time streaming inserts.

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub, Dataproc, and BigQuery.

Answer

Cloud IoT Core, Data Fusion, and Cloud Bigtable.

Answer

Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, and BigQuery.

Question 11

A company is using Cloud Spanner to serve a global gaming application. They have a single instance in us-central1. Players in Asia experience high latency. The application reads and writes player profiles. The team wants to reduce latency for Asian players while keeping write latency low for global consistency. They need a solution that minimizes operational overhead and uses native Spanner capabilities. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Configure a multi-region instance configuration that includes us-central1 and an Asian region.. A multi-region instance configuration in Cloud Spanner is the correct solution because it provides a single writable instance that spans multiple geographic regions, allowing reads and writes to be served locally in each region while maintaining strong global consistency. This minimizes latency for Asian players by enabling local reads and writes, and it uses native Spanner capabilities without additional operational overhead. Option A directly addresses the requirement for low write latency and global consistency by leveraging Spanner's built-in multi-region replication.

Answer

Add read replicas in Asia using Spanner's read-only replicas.

Answer

Use Cloud CDN to cache player profiles at the edge.

Answer

Create a new instance in asia-east1 and use Directed Read options to route reads from Asia.

Question 12

A company uses Cloud Armor to protect their HTTP Load Balancer from DDoS attacks. Recently, they experienced a targeted attack that bypassed Cloud Armor's predefined rules. The attack involved a high rate of legitimate-looking requests from a small set of IPs that made the application unresponsive. The team needs to block the attack quickly without affecting legitimate users. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Enable Google Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection.. Option C is correct because Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection uses machine learning to analyze traffic patterns and automatically create tailored rules to block application-layer DDoS attacks that bypass predefined rules. In this scenario, the attack consists of legitimate-looking requests from a small set of IPs, which Adaptive Protection can detect as anomalous and generate a custom signature to block without manual intervention, preserving access for legitimate users.

Answer

Increase the load balancer's capacity to absorb the attack.

Answer

Configure rate limiting with a threshold based on the normal traffic pattern.

Answer

Add the attacking IPs to a Cloud Armor deny list.

Question 13

A company is migrating to Google Cloud and needs to connect their on-premises network to a VPC. They require high bandwidth and a reliable connection with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Which solution should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Interconnect. Dedicated Interconnect provides a direct, private physical connection between your on-premises network and Google's network, offering high bandwidth (10 or 100 Gbps per link) and a 99.99% uptime SLA when configured with redundant links. This meets the requirements for high bandwidth and a reliable, SLA-backed connection better than any other option.

Answer

Cloud VPN with dynamic routing

Answer

Partner Interconnect via a service provider

Answer

Direct Peering

Question 14

A media company wants to serve publicly available images and videos to a global audience with low latency. Which Google Cloud service should they primarily use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN with Cloud Storage as the origin.. Cloud CDN with Cloud Storage as the origin is the correct choice because it uses Google's global edge cache to serve publicly available images and videos from Cloud Storage, minimizing latency for a global audience. Cloud CDN caches content at edge locations worldwide, reducing the round-trip time to the origin bucket, while Cloud Storage provides scalable, durable object storage. This combination is purpose-built for delivering static content with low latency and high throughput.

Answer

Cloud Storage with public bucket serving the files.

Answer

Cloud Run with a container that serves the files.

Answer

Compute Engine with an HTTP server.

Question 15

You need to store object data that is accessed infrequently (once a quarter) but must be retained for 10 years for compliance. Which storage class is the most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Archive. Archive storage class is the most cost-effective for data accessed once a quarter and retained for 10 years because it offers the lowest storage cost among Google Cloud Storage classes, designed for long-term preservation with retrieval times in minutes (typically under 15 minutes). The infrequent access pattern (once per quarter) aligns with Archive's trade-off of higher retrieval costs and minimum storage duration of 365 days, which is easily met by the 10-year retention requirement.

Answer

Standard

Answer

Nearline

Answer

Coldline