Google PCA Practice Test 9 — 10 Questions

Question 1

Match each GCP security service to its function.

Question 2

A company runs a critical application on a Compute Engine instance. They want to ensure that the application remains available even if the instance crashes. Which two GCP features should they use? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Instance template with automatic restart.. Option C is correct because an instance template with automatic restart enables Compute Engine to automatically restart a VM instance if it crashes or is terminated due to a non-user-initiated failure. This feature is configured at the instance level and ensures that the application recovers quickly without manual intervention, improving availability for a single-instance workload.

Answer

Regular snapshots of the persistent disk.

Answer

A load balancer distributing traffic to a single instance.

Answer

A Cloud CDN to cache static content.

Question 3

A company uses Cloud Armor to protect their HTTP Load Balancer from DDoS attacks. During a traffic spike from a legitimate source, legitimate requests are being blocked. How should they tune the security policy to minimize false positives?

Accepted Answer

Enable adaptive protection with machine learning. Option C is correct because enabling adaptive protection uses machine learning to distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic, automatically adjusting rules. Increasing rate limiting threshold may help but is static. Whitelisting IPs is not scalable. Disabling WAF rules removes protection entirely.

Answer

Increase the rate limiting threshold

Answer

Disable the Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules

Answer

Use the JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication to filter requests

Question 4

A company uses Cloud Storage to store user-uploaded content. They want to ensure that the data is highly durable and protected against accidental deletion. Which two features should they enable? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Object versioning.. Options A and B are correct: Object versioning preserves previous versions, and retention policy prevents deletion until the retention period ends. Option C lifecycle management is for automated deletion. Option D requester pays is for billing. Option E uniform bucket-level access is for access control.

Answer

Requester pays.

Answer

Lifecycle management.

Answer

Uniform bucket-level access.

Question 5

An application running on Compute Engine instances behind a load balancer experiences intermittent failures. Health checks show instances passing, but some users get errors. What should be the first troubleshooting step?

Accepted Answer

Review the application logs for errors.. The correct first step is to review the application logs (Option B) because the issue is intermittent failures despite healthy load balancer health checks. Since health checks confirm the instances are reachable and responding correctly at the health check endpoint, the problem likely lies within the application itself—such as request handling errors, timeouts, or resource contention. Application logs provide the most direct evidence of what is happening when users encounter errors, enabling targeted debugging before modifying infrastructure.

Answer

Increase instance size.

Answer

Enable HTTP health checks.

Answer

Check the load balancer's backend service configuration for session affinity.

Question 6

A company is deploying a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to ensure that the cluster can automatically scale based on custom metrics, such as the number of pending requests per pod. Which two steps should they take? (Choose TWO)

Accepted Answer

Deploy the Metrics Server in the cluster to expose custom metrics via the Custom Metrics API.. Option A is correct because the Metrics Server is required to expose custom metrics via the Custom Metrics API in GKE. Without it, the HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) cannot retrieve the custom metrics needed for scaling decisions. Option B is correct because the application must expose custom metrics (e.g., pending requests) through an endpoint, and the HPA must be configured to reference that custom metric name to trigger scaling based on that specific value.

Answer

Enable the Cloud Monitoring API and create a custom dashboard to track pending requests.

Answer

Configure a HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) with the target average CPU utilization set to 80%.

Answer

Enable GKE Autopilot mode to automatically manage scaling based on custom metrics.

Question 7

Your service has a 99.99% uptime SLO (monthly error budget ~ 4 minutes). Which TWO monitoring practices best support this SLO? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Use a combination of availability (e.g., HTTP 200 rate) and latency (e.g., p99) as SLIs.. Options B and D are correct. A good SLI combines availability and latency into a single measure; the error budget approach is the standard way to manage SLOs. Option A is wrong: CPU alone is not a user-facing SLI. Option C is wrong: Alerting on every 5xx error can lead to alert fatigue; better to alert based on error budget burn rate. Option E is wrong: Synthetic monitoring is useful but not alone sufficient; a combination of real and synthetic is recommended.

Answer

Monitor CPU utilization and alert when average exceeds 80%.

Answer

Use only synthetic monitoring from multiple locations.

Answer

Alert on every 5xx error immediately.

Question 8

A company has a microservices architecture on GKE. One service is failing due to resource exhaustion. How can they proactively prevent this?

Accepted Answer

Configure a horizontal pod autoscaler with custom metrics.. Option B is correct because a horizontal pod autoscaler with custom metrics (e.g., memory, request queue depth) can detect resource exhaustion early and scale pods before failure. Option A is wrong because CPU-based autoscaling may not capture all exhaustion types. Option C is wrong because vertical pod autoscaling may not react fast enough. Option D is wrong because cluster autoscaler scales nodes, not pods.

Answer

Use vertical pod autoscaling.

Answer

Set up autoscaling based on CPU utilization.

Answer

Implement a cluster autoscaler.

Question 9

A company is designing a highly available web application on Google Cloud. The application consists of stateless compute instances behind a global HTTP(S) Load Balancer. The compute instances must be able to handle sudden spikes in traffic. Which TWO strategies should the company implement? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use a managed instance group with autoscaling based on CPU utilization.. Option B is correct because a managed instance group with autoscaling based on CPU utilization automatically adjusts the number of stateless compute instances in response to traffic spikes, ensuring the application can handle sudden load increases without manual intervention. This aligns with the requirement for stateless instances behind a global load balancer, as autoscaling adds or removes instances based on real-time CPU metrics, providing elasticity and high availability.

Answer

Use Cloud CDN to cache all responses from the application servers.

Answer

Use a single Compute Engine instance in a single zone with a large machine type.

Answer

Use vertical scaling by selecting a machine type with more vCPUs and memory.

Question 10

A company is migrating on-premises workloads to Google Cloud. They have a critical application that requires consistent low-latency access to a database, with read replicas in multiple regions for disaster recovery. The application is expected to grow by 10x over the next year. Which database service and configuration should the architect choose to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Spanner with multi-region configuration. Cloud Spanner with a multi-region configuration is the correct choice because it provides strong global consistency, low-latency reads and writes across regions, and automatic horizontal scaling to handle a 10x growth in workload. Its multi-region replication ensures synchronous replication for disaster recovery while maintaining ACID transactions, which is critical for a database requiring consistent low-latency access.

Answer

Use Cloud Bigtable with multi-region replication

Answer

Use Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with cross-region read replicas

Answer

Use Firestore in native mode with multi-region location