Google PCA Practice Test 8 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company runs batch processing jobs nightly that can tolerate interruptions. They want to minimize compute costs for these jobs. Which Compute Engine machine type and provisioning model is most cost-effective?

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

Accepted Answer

Preemptible VMs with custom machine types. Preemptible/Spot VMs offer significant discounts (up to 91%) and are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads like batch processing.

Answer

E2 custom VMs with sole-tenant nodes

Answer

N2 standard VMs with committed use discounts

Answer

GPU-accelerated VMs

Question 2

A media company runs a stateless web application on Compute Engine behind an HTTP(S) load balancer. They want to automatically replace unhealthy VMs and maintain a fixed number of running instances across two zones. What should they use?

Accepted Answer

A regional managed instance group with a fixed target size and autohealing. A managed instance group (MIG) with autoscaling based on average CPU utilization can maintain a target CPU level, but to keep a fixed number of instances, they should use a MIG without autoscaling and rely on autohealing to replace unhealthy VMs.

Answer

An unmanaged instance group with health checks

Answer

A zonal managed instance group with autoscaling

Answer

Compute Engine with instance templates and no group

Question 3

A company deploys a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTP(S) Load Balancer. Users report intermittent 502 errors. Investigation shows backend instances are healthy. What is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The backend service's timeout setting is too low. HTTP 502 errors from a load balancer often indicate that the backend is closing the connection or not responding in time. The backend connection timeout or request timeout might be too low. Instance health checks passing means the instance is responsive to health check probes, but the actual application requests may be timing out. SSL certificate errors usually cause 400-level errors. Insufficient capacity would cause 503 or 504 errors. Incorrect firewall rules would prevent health checks from passing.

Answer

The SSL certificate has expired

Answer

The firewall rules are blocking traffic from the load balancer

Answer

The backend instances are running out of memory

Question 4

A company needs to design a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application running on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 minutes, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 30 minutes. Which THREE actions should they take to meet these objectives? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Configure cross-region replication for the Cloud SQL instance. Cross-region replication with failover replicas can achieve RPO of a few seconds and RTO of minutes. Point-in-time recovery and automated backups provide additional recovery options but may not meet RPO as low as 5 minutes alone.

Answer

Take regular on-demand exports to Cloud Storage

Answer

Create a failover replica in the same region

Question 5

A company is migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture on GCP. They want to use an event-driven approach to decouple services and ensure reliable message delivery. Which TWO services should they use for inter-service communication? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Eventarc. Pub/Sub is a fully managed messaging service for asynchronous event-driven communication between services. Eventarc allows routing events from various sources to services like Cloud Run, enabling event-driven architecture.

Answer

Cloud Scheduler

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Cloud Tasks

Question 6

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?

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 7

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 8

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 9

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 10

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