Google PCA Design and plan a cloud solution architecture Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A healthcare analytics firm must store 40 TB of genomic data for seven years. The data is written once and read only during annual audits. Retrieval must complete within 24 hours of a request, and the lowest possible storage cost is the priority. Which Cloud Storage configuration should the architect choose?

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

Accepted Answer

Archive storage class with an Object Lifecycle Management rule that transitions the data to Archive after upload, plus a bucket retention policy.. Archive is the cheapest Cloud Storage class and is explicitly intended for data accessed less than once per year, which fits genomic records read only during annual audits. Object Lifecycle Management can transition uploads into Archive automatically so no manual class assignment is needed, and a bucket retention policy enforces the seven-year compliance hold. Archive retrieval is fast enough to meet the 24-hour audit deadline, making this both the cheapest and compliant design.

Answer

Nearline storage class with Autoclass enabled so objects move between classes based on access patterns.

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Coldline storage class with a seven-year retention policy and a Cloud Scheduler job that rewrites the objects annually.

Answer

Standard storage class with a bucket lock retention policy of seven years.

Question 2

A retail company is designing a hybrid architecture where its on-premises data center connects to a Google Cloud VPC. The network team needs a solution that provides deterministic routing, supports 10 Gbps of bandwidth per link, and allows the company to use its own BGP autonomous system number and IP address ranges. They also want the ability to add redundant links with automatic failover. Which two Google Cloud components should the architect include in the design? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Interconnect with two or more 10 Gbps attachments in different edge availability domains, configured with BGP.. The requirements are deterministic routing, 10 Gbps per link, customer-controlled BGP ASN, and redundant failover. Dedicated Interconnect delivers dedicated 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps links with BGP and redundant attachments in separate edge availability domains. Partner Interconnect provides the same capabilities through a service provider when colocation is not feasible. Both support the customer's own ASN and IP ranges, and both can be designed for automatic failover.

Answer

Cloud VPN with HA VPN gateways and two tunnels in different regions, using dynamic routing with Cloud Router.

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VPC Network Peering between the on-premises network and the Google Cloud VPC.

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Cloud CDN with global external HTTP(S) load balancing to cache traffic between the data center and the VPC.

Question 3

A SaaS provider runs a multi-tenant application on Google Kubernetes Engine in a single region. Customers in North America and Europe complain about latency, and the provider wants a design that serves each region locally while keeping a single logical control plane for deployments. The operations team has limited capacity to manage per-region clusters. Which design should the architect propose?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a GKE cluster in each region and use a global external Application Load Balancer with a single anycast IP for the data plane, while using a single GKE Enterprise fleet to manage all clusters centrally.. The design must serve each region locally, present one logical control plane, and minimize operational burden. A fleet of regional GKE clusters managed centrally satisfies the management constraint, while a global external Application Load Balancer with anycast routes each user to the nearest healthy regional backend. Single-region clusters cannot meet the latency goal, and per-region load balancers with DNS steering add nondeterminism and do not reduce cluster management effort.

Answer

Deploy a single GKE cluster in one region and use Cloud CDN in front of the application to serve both North American and European users from edge locations.

Answer

Deploy a single GKE cluster in each region and expose each cluster with its own regional external Application Load Balancer, then use DNS-based global load balancing to steer users.

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Deploy separate GKE clusters in each region, expose them through a global external Application Load Balancer with a single anycast IP, and use a GitOps pipeline to apply the same manifests to every cluster.

Question 4

A global e-commerce company is designing an architecture to serve product catalog reads from a database that must remain available even if an entire Google Cloud region becomes unreachable. The catalog is read-heavy, tolerates eventual consistency, and must provide low-latency reads to users in North America, Europe, and Asia. Writes are infrequent and can be performed in a single region. Which database design should the architect choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner with a multi-region configuration and read-only replicas in each continent, using staleness-bounded reads for catalog queries.. The workload is read-heavy, tolerates eventual consistency, needs low-latency reads on three continents, and must survive a full region loss. Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations replicate across regions with synchronous replication for writes and offer read-only replicas that serve local reads. Staleness-bounded reads let queries read slightly stale data from the nearest replica, reducing latency while meeting the consistency tolerance. This is the only option providing both global low-latency reads and region-loss availability for a relational catalog.

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with a cross-region read replica and a global external HTTP(S) load balancer directing reads to the nearest replica.

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Bigtable with a multi-cluster routing policy and application-level replication to each continent.

Answer

Firestore in Native mode with multi-region location and client SDKs that perform local reads.

Question 5

A multinational bank is planning a hybrid architecture. Workloads in two on-premises data centers must reach Google Cloud APIs and private services without traversing the public internet, and traffic must automatically reroute if one of the two Dedicated Interconnect attachments fails. The bank also needs predictable bandwidth. Which design meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

One Dedicated Interconnect connection in each data center, both attached to the same Cloud Router, with Private Google Access enabled on the subnets and a global dynamic route for the VPC.. Dedicated Interconnect provides dedicated, predictable bandwidth, and placing one connection in each data center gives physical path redundancy. Attaching both to a single Cloud Router lets BGP withdraw the failed link's routes automatically, so traffic reroutes without manual action. Private Google Access plus global dynamic routing then lets on-premises hosts reach Google APIs and services privately and keeps routes working across regions.

Answer

A high-availability Cloud VPN pair over two internet providers, with BGP configured on the tunnels and Private Google Access enabled on the subnets.

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A single Dedicated Interconnect connection with two separate VLAN attachments in different metros, with Cloud VPN as the only failover path.

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Two Partner Interconnect connections from different providers in the same metro, attached to two different Cloud Routers in the same region, with global dynamic routing disabled.

Question 6

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

Question 7

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application currently runs on a single on-premises server and uses a local MySQL database. The company wants to minimize changes to the application code while improving scalability and reliability. Which migration strategy should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Rehost the application on Compute Engine and use Cloud SQL for MySQL as the database.. Rehosting (lift-and-shift) the monolithic application to Compute Engine with Cloud SQL for MySQL minimizes code changes while improving scalability and reliability. Cloud SQL provides managed MySQL with automated backups, replication, and failover, addressing the need for reliability without requiring application refactoring.

Answer

Refactor the application into microservices and deploy on Google Kubernetes Engine.

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Containerize the application with Docker and run it on Cloud Run.

Answer

Migrate the database to Firestore and rewrite the application to use Firestore APIs.

Question 8

A global e-commerce platform is experiencing intermittent latency spikes during flash sales. The application is deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a regional cluster. The architecture includes a frontend service, a product catalog service using Cloud Spanner, and an order processing service using Cloud Pub/Sub. During high load, the catalog service shows increased query latency, and some requests time out. What should the architect prioritize to address the issue?

Accepted Answer

Enable Cloud Spanner interleaved tables and add secondary indexes for common query filters.. The issue is specifically with Cloud Spanner query latency under high load. Enabling interleaved tables and adding secondary indexes optimizes data locality and query performance, reducing the need for expensive cross-table joins and full table scans. This directly addresses the root cause of increased latency and timeouts in the catalog service.

Answer

Use Cloud CDN to cache product catalog responses.

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Increase the number of nodes in the GKE node pool.

Answer

Migrate the catalog service from Cloud Spanner to Cloud Bigtable for better read performance.

Question 9

A startup is developing a real-time analytics dashboard that ingests data from IoT devices. The data volume is unpredictable but can spike to millions of events per second. The dashboard must display near real-time aggregations with sub-second latency. Which Google Cloud architecture should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Ingest via Cloud Pub/Sub, process with Cloud Dataflow, store in Cloud Bigtable, and query from the dashboard.. Cloud Pub/Sub provides scalable, asynchronous ingestion for unpredictable IoT data spikes, Cloud Dataflow enables stream processing for near real-time aggregations with sub-second latency, and Cloud Bigtable offers low-latency, high-throughput storage ideal for serving aggregated results directly to a dashboard. This combination meets the requirements of unpredictable volume, real-time processing, and low-latency queries.

Answer

Ingest via Cloud IoT Core directly to Cloud Bigtable, then query with BigQuery.

Answer

Ingest via Cloud Pub/Sub, process with Cloud Dataproc, store in Cloud Storage, and query with BigQuery.

Answer

Ingest via Cloud Pub/Sub, store raw data in Cloud Storage, and use Cloud SQL for aggregations.

Question 10

A company wants to restrict access to a Cloud Storage bucket so that only a specific service account can read objects. The bucket contains sensitive data. Which identity and access management (IAM) approach should the architect use?

Accepted Answer

Grant the service account roles/storage.objectViewer on the bucket and remove all other bindings.. The principle of least privilege dictates that the service account should be granted only the minimal permissions required to read objects, which is roles/storage.objectViewer. By removing all other bindings, the bucket becomes accessible exclusively to that service account, ensuring that no other identities (users, groups, or other service accounts) can read the sensitive data. This approach directly enforces the requirement using IAM roles on the bucket resource.

Answer

Grant the service account roles/iam.serviceAccountUser on the bucket.

Answer

Use a signed URL to allow access for the service account.

Answer

Grant the service account roles/storage.admin on the bucket.

Question 11

Drag and drop the steps to set up a VPC network peering between two projects in Google Cloud into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

1. Verify that the VPC networks have non-overlapping IP ranges.
2. Create a VPC peering connection from Project A to Project B.
3. Create a VPC peering connection from Project B to Project A.
4. Verify the peering status and network connectivity.. VPC peering requires bidirectional connections; both sides must initiate peering. IP ranges must not overlap.

Answer

1. Verify that the VPC networks have non-overlapping IP ranges.
2. Create a VPC peering connection from Project A to Project B.
3. Verify the peering status and network connectivity. (No peering from Project B to Project A)

Answer

1. Create a VPC peering connection from Project A to Project B.
2. Create a VPC peering connection from Project B to Project A.
3. Verify that the VPC networks have non-overlapping IP ranges.
4. Verify the peering status and network connectivity.

Answer

1. Create a VPC peering connection from Project B to Project A.
2. Create a VPC peering connection from Project A to Project B.
3. Verify that the VPC networks have non-overlapping IP ranges.
4. Verify the peering status and network connectivity.

Question 12

Drag and drop the steps to recover a Cloud SQL instance from a backup into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Step 1: Identify the backup, Step 2: Create a new Cloud SQL instance, Step 3: Restore the backup to the new instance, Step 4: Redirect applications to the new instance.. Restoring to an existing instance may overwrite data; best practice is to restore to a new instance.

Answer

Step 1: Identify the backup, Step 2: Restore the backup to the existing instance, Step 3: Verify the data, Step 4: Redirect applications if needed.

Answer

Step 1: Create a new Cloud SQL instance, Step 2: Identify the backup, Step 3: Restore the backup to the new instance, Step 4: Redirect applications.

Answer

Step 1: Identify the backup, Step 2: Redirect applications to a new instance, Step 3: Restore the backup to the new instance, Step 4: Verify the restoration.

Question 13

Match each GCP security service to its function.

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor: Protects against DDoS attacks and web application firewall. Cloud Armor protects against DDoS and web attacks; IAP controls access based on identity; KMS handles encryption keys; DLP protects sensitive data. Distractors swap these functions.

Answer

Cloud Armor: Manages encryption keys for cloud services

Answer

Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP): Scans for vulnerabilities in compute instances

Question 14

A multinational e-commerce company needs a globally distributed database that provides strong consistency and transactional support for order processing. Which Google Cloud database service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the correct choice because it is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database service that provides strong consistency and full ACID transactional support across regions. Unlike other Google Cloud databases, Spanner uses synchronous replication and the TrueTime API to guarantee external consistency, making it ideal for order processing systems that require both global scale and transactional integrity.

Answer

Cloud SQL

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Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud Firestore

Question 15

A data analytics company runs nightly batch jobs using Compute Engine instances. The jobs can tolerate interruptions, and the company wants to minimize costs. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs for the batch jobs.. Preemptible VMs (now called Spot VMs) are Compute Engine instances that last up to 24 hours and can be terminated at any time by Google Cloud. Because the batch jobs are interruptible, using preemptible VMs reduces compute costs by up to 60-91% compared to standard on-demand VMs, directly meeting the goal of minimizing costs.

Answer

Use C2 high-CPU machine types for faster processing.

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Use standard (on-demand) VMs and commit to a 1-year resource-based commitment.

Answer

Deploy VMs on Sole-tenant nodes for cost isolation.