Google PCA Practice Test 9 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company has set up an external HTTP(S) load balancer with a backend service pointing to a managed instance group. Some instances are failing health checks. Which TWO actions should the company take to troubleshoot the issue?

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

Accepted Answer

Ensure the health check path specified in the backend service returns a 200 OK status.. The HTTP(S) load balancer's health check probes the specified path on each backend instance. If the path does not return a 200 OK status, the load balancer marks the instance as unhealthy and stops sending traffic to it. Ensuring the health check path returns a 200 OK is the first step in verifying that the health check is configured correctly.

Answer

Disable session affinity to allow better distribution of traffic.

Answer

Change the health check interval from 5 seconds to 30 seconds.

Answer

Increase the number of instances in the instance group to distribute the load.

Question 2

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 content at Google's edge locations, providing low-latency delivery and offloading traffic from the origin. HTTP(S) Load Balancer is required to enable Cloud CDN and provides global load balancing and DDoS protection. Cloud Armor adds WAF capabilities but is not required for basic CDN.

Answer

Cloud Armor with Cloud CDN

Answer

Cloud CDN with an internal TCP/UDP load balancer

Answer

Cloud Functions to serve static content

Question 3

A company is migrating a legacy Java application to GCP. The application currently runs on a single on-premises server with a MySQL database. They want to minimize changes to the application code but take advantage of GCP managed services. Which TWO approaches should they consider? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Lift and shift the application to Compute Engine and use Cloud SQL for MySQL.. Lift-and-shift (migrating the application to Compute Engine as-is) and re-platform (using Cloud SQL for MySQL) are the best approaches to minimize code changes. Re-architecting as microservices would require significant code changes. Cloud Functions and Firebase are not suitable for a legacy Java application.

Answer

Use Firebase Realtime Database to replace MySQL.

Answer

Use Cloud Functions to replace the application logic.

Answer

Re-architect the application as a set of microservices on GKE.

Question 4

An engineering team is deploying a microservices application on Google Cloud. They want to use a service mesh for observability, traffic management, and security. They are considering Anthos Service Mesh (ASM). Which THREE components are part of ASM? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Envoy sidecar proxies. ASM uses Istio as the control plane, Envoy as the sidecar proxy, and integrates with Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) for telemetry. GKE is the platform, but not a component of ASM. Cloud Endpoints is a separate API management service.

Answer

Cloud Endpoints

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Question 5

A company wants to save costs on batch-processing workloads that can be interrupted and resumed. The workloads run on Compute Engine VMs and tolerate occasional failures. Which VM pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Spot VMs. Spot VMs (formerly preemptible) offer up to 60-91% discount but can be terminated at any time. They are ideal for fault-tolerant batch jobs. Committed use discounts provide lower prices for 1- or 3-year commitments. Standard VMs are on-demand. The question specifies cost savings and tolerance to interruption.

Answer

Preemptible VMs (with no discount)

Answer

Standard (on-demand) VMs

Answer

Committed use discounts (1-year)

Question 6

An e-commerce company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL to handle user sessions. During Black Friday sales, the database experiences high read latency and connection timeouts. The traffic pattern shows 95% read operations and 5% write operations. They need to improve read performance without significant architectural changes. Which action should they take?

Accepted Answer

Add Cloud SQL read replicas and configure the application to use them for read operations.. Adding read replicas offloads read traffic from the primary instance, improving read latency and reducing connection timeouts. Read replicas are easy to configure and cost-effective.

Answer

Enable Cloud SQL Proxy to reduce connection overhead.

Answer

Migrate from Cloud SQL to Cloud Spanner for better scalability.

Answer

Enable automatic storage increases and increase the machine type of the primary instance.

Question 7

A cloud architect is designing a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application. Each service is deployed to Cloud Run. They want to use Cloud Build to automate building and deploying services only when changes occur in their respective directories. Which Cloud Build feature should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Build triggers with included files filter. Cloud Build triggers can be configured with regular expressions to match changed files in specific directories, so builds are only started for relevant changes. Build steps define actions but not triggers; cloudbuild.yaml is the build configuration file; Artifact Registry is a storage service.

Answer

Build steps in cloudbuild.yaml

Answer

Cloud Build's 'includedFiles' option in the build configuration

Answer

Artifact Registry triggers

Question 8

A company wants to migrate an on-premises MySQL database to GCP with minimal downtime and support for automated failover in case of a zone outage. Which GCP service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL. Cloud SQL for MySQL provides managed MySQL with zone-level high availability via a standby instance in a different zone. Automated failover is built-in. Bigtable and Firestore are NoSQL databases, and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL is not MySQL.

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Firestore

Question 9

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to minimise changes while taking advantage of cloud benefits. Which TWO migration strategies are most appropriate? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Lift-and-shift (rehost) to Compute Engine. Lift-and-shift (rehost) moves the application as-is with minimal changes. Replatform makes limited adjustments (e.g., using a managed database) without changing the core architecture. Both reduce risk and effort compared to re-architecting.

Answer

Re-architect (refactor) into microservices

Answer

Retire the application

Answer

Replace (repurchase) with SaaS

Question 10

A company needs to connect their on-premises data center to Google Cloud with a dedicated, low-latency, and highly available connection. They require at least 10 Gbps throughput and want to avoid internet-based VPN. Which connectivity option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Cloud Interconnect. Dedicated Cloud Interconnect provides a direct physical connection between on-premises and Google Cloud, offering high throughput (10 Gbps or more), low latency, and high availability. Partner Interconnect uses a third-party provider, introducing potential latency. HA VPN uses the internet but can be high availability; still internet-based. Classic VPN is a single tunnel with lower reliability.

Answer

Partner Cloud Interconnect

Answer

Classic VPN

Answer

HA VPN