Google PCA Practice Test 37 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is building a serverless event-driven application that processes messages from Pub/Sub and stores results in Firestore. Which THREE Google Cloud services should they use together to implement this architecture? (Choose THREE.)

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

Accepted Answer

Firestore. Cloud Functions is a serverless compute option that can be triggered by Pub/Sub messages. Pub/Sub provides asynchronous messaging. Firestore is a NoSQL database for storing results. Cloud Run is also serverless but not event-driven by Pub/Sub out-of-the-box (requires additional setup). Compute Engine and Cloud SQL are not serverless.

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Cloud Run

Question 2

A development team uses BigQuery for analytical queries. They want to reduce query costs for a large table that is frequently filtered by a date column and a customer_id column. Which TWO table design strategies will reduce the amount of data scanned? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Partition the table by date.. Partitioning by date limits scans to relevant partitions. Clustering on customer_id further organizes data within partitions for efficient filtering. Both reduce data scanned. Indexes and normalization are not applicable in BigQuery.

Answer

Create an index on customer_id.

Answer

Use wildcard tables with date suffixes.

Answer

Normalize the table into multiple tables.

Question 3

Match each GCP storage service to its typical use case.

Accepted Answer

Cloud Storage: Object storage for unstructured data. Cloud Storage is for unstructured object storage, Cloud SQL for relational data, Cloud Bigtable for wide-column NoSQL analytics, and Firestore for document NoSQL apps. Common confusions involve mixing storage types with database services.

Answer

Cloud Storage: Relational database for transactional workloads

Answer

Cloud SQL: Object storage for media files

Question 4

A company wants to migrate a large on-premises relational database to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with minimal downtime. They need to ensure data consistency during the migration. Which THREE steps should they take?

Accepted Answer

Set up a VPN or Cloud Interconnect between on-premises and GCP. To migrate with minimal downtime, use Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication, perform an initial dump/load to seed the target, and then cut over by stopping writes on the source and promoting the target. Using a read replica would not sync data. A VPN/Interconnect is required for secure connectivity.

Answer

Create a read replica of the source database in Cloud SQL

Answer

Switch traffic to Cloud SQL immediately after the initial import

Question 5

A company is designing a microservices application on Google Cloud. They want to use an event-driven architecture where services communicate asynchronously. They need to reliably handle high-throughput events and ensure that each event is processed at least once. Which TWO services should they use together?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub. Pub/Sub is a scalable, asynchronous messaging service that delivers events at least once. Dataflow can be used to process streams of events from Pub/Sub with exactly-once semantics. Cloud Functions can be triggered by Pub/Sub but is not built for high-throughput stream processing. Cloud Tasks is for task queues, not general pub/sub. Cloud Scheduler is for cron jobs.

Answer

Cloud Scheduler

Answer

Cloud Tasks

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 6

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine with a stateful workload. They want to achieve 99.99% availability within a single region. Which architecture should they recommend?

Accepted Answer

Two instances in different zones with a regional persistent disk attached to the active instance and failover using a load balancer. It uses a regional persistent disk, which synchronously replicates data across two zones within the same region, ensuring data durability and availability. The active instance in one zone attaches the disk, and a load balancer with health checks detects failures and redirects traffic to the standby instance in the other zone, enabling automatic failover to meet the 99.99% availability target.

Answer

Two instances in different zones with a zonal persistent disk each and data replication using a custom script

Answer

One instance in a single zone with a persistent disk snapshot every hour

Answer

Four instances across two zones with a regional persistent disk and active-passive failover using a health check

Question 7

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. Using partitioned tables allows BigQuery to scan only relevant partitions, reducing data scanned and improving speed. Increasing slot capacity provides more compute resources for the query. Partition elimination reduces data scanned; using clustering can also help but is not listed. Caching results only helps if the query is repeated; the job runs hourly with new data. Using legacy SQL does not improve performance.

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 8

A financial services company is migrating a monolithic Java application to Google Cloud. They want to minimize changes to the application code but take advantage of managed services. They plan to run the application on a VM with a specific OS configuration that is not supported by App Engine. Which migration strategy should they use?

Accepted Answer

Lift-and-shift to Compute Engine with Cloud SQL for the database. Lift-and-shift is appropriate when minimal code changes are desired and the application can run on VMs. Re-platform would involve moving to a managed service like Cloud SQL but still typically requires some changes. Re-architect is a full rewrite. Since they need a custom OS, App Engine is not an option.

Answer

Re-architect the application as microservices on GKE

Answer

Re-platform to App Engine Flexible Environment

Answer

Re-platform to Cloud Run

Question 9

A company requires a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency across regions and automatic replication. They need to support SQL queries and have a write throughput of 100,000 writes per second. Which Google Cloud database meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database that supports SQL and can scale to millions of writes per second. Cloud SQL is regional, Bigtable is NoSQL and not relational, BigQuery is an analytics warehouse.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Cloud SQL with cross-region replication

Question 10

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on Compute Engine with data in Cloud SQL. They require a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Configure a Cloud SQL cross-region replica in the DR region. Cloud SQL replica in another region provides cross-region replication with RPO of seconds to minutes. Managed instance group in the DR region allows quick failover of compute. Cloud DNS with weighted routing can direct traffic to the DR region upon failover, meeting RTO within 1 hour.

Answer

Enable Cloud SQL automatic storage increase

Answer

Use Cloud CDN to cache static content globally

Question 11

A company is building a web application on GKE. They want to automatically scale the number of pods based on HTTP request rate. Which TWO resources should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Custom Metrics API (e.g., Stackdriver Adapter). Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) scales pods based on CPU/memory or custom metrics. To scale based on HTTP request rate, they need to expose custom metrics (e.g., from Stackdriver/Cloud Monitoring) via the Custom Metrics API. The Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) adjusts resource requests, not pod count. Node autoscaler scales nodes, not pods. Ingress is for traffic routing.

Answer

Cluster Autoscaler (Node Auto-scaling)

Answer

GKE Ingress

Answer

Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

Question 12

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours. They are using the Regional Cloud SQL tier. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Configure cross-region replication by creating a cross-region replica.. Cross-region replication (replica) provides failover to another region with an RPO < 1 hour. Automated backups with point-in-time recovery can restore within RTO if the replica is also used. Enabling deletion protection is a safety measure but not DR. A read replica in the same region does not help cross-region. Scaling CPU does not affect DR.

Answer

Increase the number of CPUs on the primary instance.

Answer

Create a read replica in the same region.

Answer

Enable deletion protection on the database.

Question 13

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to a microservices architecture on GKE. They want to gradually shift traffic from the monolith to the new services. They also need to route requests based on headers (e.g., for A/B testing). Which GKE feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Anthos Service Mesh. GKE provides traffic management through Kubernetes Ingress with custom resource definitions like the Multi-Cluster Ingress or using Service Mesh. However, for traffic splitting based on headers, the GKE Ingress alone doesn't support it. GKE supports Service Mesh (Anthos Service Mesh) which uses Istio to provide advanced traffic routing, including header-based routing and canary deployments. GKE Autopilot is a mode, not a traffic management feature. Node pools are for compute resources.

Answer

GKE Ingress with multiple backend services

Answer

Node pools with different machine types

Answer

GKE Autopilot

Question 14

An organization needs to store API keys and database passwords securely in Google Cloud. They want to automatically rotate secrets every 30 days. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Secret Manager. Secret Manager supports automatic rotation with a rotation period and can trigger a Cloud Function to generate a new secret version.

Answer

Cloud Storage with bucket-level encryption

Answer

Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS)

Answer

Cloud Runtime Configurator

Question 15

A company runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that experiences sudden spikes in traffic. They need to automatically scale the number of pods and also ensure that the cluster itself can scale by adding new nodes when needed. Which TWO components should they configure to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Cluster Autoscaler. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) automatically scales the number of pods based on CPU utilization or other metrics. Cluster Autoscaler automatically adjusts the size of the GKE cluster by adding or removing nodes when pods are unschedulable or nodes are underutilized. Together they provide pod-level and node-level scaling. Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) adjusts resource requests but does not scale pods or nodes. Node Auto-Repair handles node health, not scaling. Pod Disruption Budget (PDB) protects pods during maintenance. Only options A and C are correct.

Answer

Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

Answer

Node Auto-Repair

Answer

Pod Disruption Budget (PDB)