Google PCA Practice Test 45 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A team wants to provide a consistent, low-latency experience for global users accessing static content (images, CSS, JS) hosted on Cloud Storage. They also need to be able to invalidate cached content quickly when updates occur. Which service should they use?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN caches content at edge locations for low latency. Cache invalidation allows purging updated content, which is essential for static assets.

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing with backend bucket

Answer

Cloud Storage transfer service

Question 2

A company uses Cloud Bigtable for time-series data. They experience high latency and uneven load distribution across nodes. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The table has a single row key pattern that causes hot spotting. Cloud Bigtable partitions data by row key range and distributes tablets across nodes. A single row key pattern (e.g., monotonically increasing timestamps) causes all writes to target the same tablet, creating a hot spot. This leads to uneven load distribution and high latency because one node is overwhelmed while others remain idle.

Answer

The data is stored in a single column family

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The app is using strong reads instead of eventual consistency

Answer

The cluster has too many nodes

Question 3

A multinational corporation must comply with GDPR and requires that all customer data stored in BigQuery be encrypted using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and that the keys are stored in a specific region. Which combination of steps should they take?

Accepted Answer

Create a Cloud KMS key ring and crypto key in the desired region, then associate the BigQuery dataset with the CMEK key using DDL. It directly fulfills the requirement: creating a Cloud KMS key ring and crypto key in the desired region, then associating the BigQuery dataset with that CMEK key using DDL (e.g., `ALTER SCHEMA mydataset SET OPTIONS(kms_key_name='...')`). This ensures that all data at rest in BigQuery is encrypted with a customer-managed key stored in a specific regional location, as mandated by GDPR for data residency and control.

Answer

Enable default encryption at rest in BigQuery and use Organization Policies to restrict key location

Answer

Create a Cloud HSM key, then use Cloud DLP to automatically encrypt the data before loading into BigQuery

Answer

Use Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) to integrate with an on-premises key management system

Question 4

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine instances in a managed instance group (MIG) with autoscaling. Users report intermittent 503 errors during traffic spikes. Which action should the company take to improve reliability?

Accepted Answer

Configure a health check with a sufficient initial delay (grace period) in the MIG. Intermittent 503 errors during traffic spikes often indicate that new VM instances are being started but are not yet ready to serve traffic, causing the load balancer to forward requests to them prematurely. Configuring a health check with a sufficient initial delay (grace period) in the MIG ensures that newly created instances are given time to fully initialize and pass health checks before they receive traffic, preventing 503 errors. This directly addresses the root cause by allowing the application to become healthy before being added to the load balancer's backend.

Answer

Change the load balancer from regional to global

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Increase the autoscaling cool-down period from 60s to 120s

Answer

Increase the maximum number of instances in the MIG

Question 5

A developer wants to deploy a stateless web application that automatically scales based on HTTP traffic. The application should be cost-effective and require minimal configuration. Which compute option is best?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is the best choice because it automatically scales to zero when idle, scales up to handle HTTP traffic spikes, and requires minimal configuration—just deploy a container. It is cost-effective as you pay only for resources used during request processing, and it supports stateless web applications natively without managing servers or clusters.

Answer

App Engine Standard Environment

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Cloud Functions

Answer

Compute Engine managed instance group

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine

Question 6

Your organization uses Cloud Spanner for a customer database with a 99.999% availability SLA. You need a Disaster Recovery plan that ensures data consistency with zero RPO in case of a region failure. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Use a multi-region instance configuration (e.g., nam-eur-asia) for the Spanner instance.. Cloud Spanner multi-region instance configurations (e.g., nam-eur-asia) provide synchronous replication across multiple regions, ensuring strong global consistency and zero RPO. This architecture uses Paxos-based replication to commit writes only after they are durably stored in a majority of regions, so a region failure does not lose any committed data. The 99.999% availability SLA is met by automatic failover within the multi-region setup without manual intervention.

Answer

Use a single-region instance configuration and enable read replicas.

Answer

Export the database periodically to Cloud Storage and set up a cross-region load balancer.

Answer

Configure daily backups and store them in Cloud Storage in a different region.

Question 7

An organization uses Cloud Storage to store critical documents. They want to protect against accidental deletion or overwriting of objects. Which feature should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Object versioning and retention policies. Object versioning and retention policies together protect against accidental deletion and overwrites. Versioning keeps multiple versions of objects, and retention policies prevent deletion until a specified time. Uniform bucket-level access is for access control, not protection. Object lifecycle management automates transitions/deletion, not protection. Encryption protects data at rest.

Answer

Uniform bucket-level access

Answer

Object lifecycle management rules

Answer

Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)

Question 8

A company wants to connect their on-premises network to Google Cloud with a 99.99% SLA using encrypted tunnels over the public internet. Which connectivity solution should they choose?

Accepted Answer

HA VPN. HA VPN provides a 99.99% SLA when configured with two VPN gateways and four tunnels over the public internet. Dedicated Interconnect is a private connection with higher bandwidth but not over the public internet. Partner Interconnect uses a partner's network, not the public internet. Standard VPN does not offer a 99.99% SLA.

Answer

Standard VPN with single tunnel

Answer

Partner Interconnect

Answer

Dedicated Interconnect

Question 9

A company has Compute Engine instances that need to access the internet for updates but should not be reachable from the internet. They also need to access Google APIs and services like Cloud Storage. Which configuration meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud NAT for outbound internet and enable Private Google Access on the subnet.. Cloud NAT provides outbound internet connectivity for instances without external IPs, while Private Google Access allows those same instances to reach Google APIs and services (like Cloud Storage) using internal IPs via the subnet's default route. This combination ensures instances can initiate outbound connections to the internet and Google services but remain unreachable from the internet, meeting both security and functional requirements.

Answer

Assign external IPs to all instances and configure firewall rules to block inbound traffic.

Answer

Configure a VPN tunnel to an on-premises proxy server for internet access.

Answer

Use Cloud NAT for outbound internet and use external IPs for Google API access.

Question 10

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 static content at Google's global edge locations to reduce latency, and it must be fronted by an external HTTP(S) Load Balancer, which provides the anycast IP, health checking, and origin shielding that Cloud CDN relies on. Together they serve static assets from edge caches and absorb traffic spikes before they reach the origin. This is the standard GCP pattern for global static content delivery with origin protection.

Answer

Cloud Armor with Cloud CDN

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Cloud CDN with an internal TCP/UDP load balancer

Answer

Cloud Functions to serve static content

Question 11

A developer needs to deploy a Python script that processes images uploaded to a Cloud Storage bucket. The script should run only when new objects are created, and should scale automatically with no idle costs. Which GCP service is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is an event-driven serverless compute service that can be triggered by Cloud Storage events (e.g., object finalize). It scales automatically, runs only when triggered, and has no idle cost. Cloud Run also works for containers, but the script is lightweight and can be written as a function. App Engine requires manual scaling setup. Compute Engine would have idle cost.

Answer

App Engine Standard Environment

Answer

Compute Engine with a startup script

Answer

Cloud Run

Question 12

A developer needs to cache session state for a web application to reduce latency. The cache must be highly available and support sub-millisecond access times. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Memorystore for Redis. Memorystore for Redis is a fully managed in-memory data store service on Google Cloud, providing sub-millisecond latency for read and write operations. It supports high availability through replication and automatic failover, making it ideal for caching session state in web applications. Other options like Firestore, Cloud Storage, and Bigtable are not in-memory and cannot guarantee sub-millisecond access times.

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Bigtable

Question 13

A financial services company must run a PostgreSQL database with strong consistency across three regions. They need to support high write throughput and require automatic failover with zero data loss. Which database service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is Google Cloud's globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database that supports horizontal scaling for high write throughput and provides automatic failover with zero data loss (RPO=0) via synchronous replication. It is the only option that meets all requirements across three regions.

Answer

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL

Answer

Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with cross-region replication

Question 14

A company is migrating 50 on-premises VMs to Compute Engine. They need to minimise downtime and want an automated lift-and-shift migration that replicates disks incrementally. Which Google Cloud service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Migrate for Compute Engine. Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly Velostrata) performs agentless, incremental replication of VM disks to Compute Engine, enabling minimal downtime migrations.

Answer

Database Migration Service

Answer

Storage Transfer Service

Answer

Transfer Appliance

Question 15

An engineer needs to share a VPC network across multiple projects in an organization while maintaining centralized network administration. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Shared VPC. Shared VPC in Google Cloud lets an organization designate a host project whose VPC network is shared with multiple service projects. This centralizes network administration (subnets, firewall rules, routes managed in the host project) while allowing teams in service projects to deploy resources into the shared network. It is the canonical answer for cross-project network sharing with centralized control.

Answer

VPC peering between all projects

Answer

Private Google Access

Answer

Cloud VPN between projects