Google PCA Timed Hard Questions — 25 Difficult Questions

Question 1

Which THREE factors should be considered when choosing a Google Cloud region for deploying a low-latency application serving global users? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Proximity to your user base to minimize network latency.. Options A, C, and D are correct. Latency to users, service availability, and data residency are key; cost is secondary, and number of zones is not a primary factor.

Answer

Pricing differences between regions due to variations in compute and storage costs.

Answer

Number of zones in the region to ensure high availability.

Question 2

A financial services company is designing a multi-tier application on Google Cloud. The application must meet PCI DSS compliance, with data encrypted at rest and in transit. They plan to use Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for transactional data and Cloud Storage for archival data. Which TWO actions should the architect take to meet compliance requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) on Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage. Option C is correct because enabling CMEK on Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage allows the company to use their own encryption keys, which is often required by PCI DSS to demonstrate control over key management. CMEK ensures data at rest is encrypted with keys managed via Cloud KMS, providing auditability and separation of duties beyond Google-managed default encryption.

Answer

Configure client-side encryption in the application code

Answer

Rely on Google-managed default encryption for all data

Answer

Use Cloud HSM with a key generated outside of Google Cloud

Question 3

A company wants to optimize their cloud spending on Google Cloud. They have a mix of workloads including batch processing, real-time analytics, and web serving. Which TWO strategies should they implement to reduce costs without significant architectural changes? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs for batch processing jobs that are fault-tolerant.. Preemptible VMs are short-lived, fault-tolerant instances that cost significantly less than standard VMs, making them ideal for batch processing jobs that can handle interruptions. This strategy directly reduces compute costs without requiring architectural changes, as the workloads are already designed to be resilient to failures.

Answer

Use sustained use discounts for short-lived instances.

Answer

Right-size all Compute Engine instances by analyzing utilization metrics.

Answer

Migrate all web serving workloads to Cloud Functions to benefit from pay-per-use pricing.

Question 4

An organization wants to enforce that all Compute Engine VMs are created with specific disk encryption keys. Which policy mechanism should they use?

Accepted Answer

Organization policies with constraints/compute.restrictDiskEncryptionKeyTypes. Option A is correct because the Organization Policy constraint `constraints/compute.restrictDiskEncryptionKeyTypes` allows administrators to enforce that all Compute Engine VMs must use specific disk encryption key types (e.g., CMEK or CSEK). This policy is evaluated at resource creation time and blocks any VM that does not comply with the allowed key types, providing a preventive control rather than a reactive one.

Answer

IAM roles with compute.diskEncryptionKey permissions

Answer

VPC Service Controls

Answer

Cloud Scheduler to check compliance

Question 5

A company is designing a highly available architecture for a stateful application on Compute Engine. They need to protect against zonal failures. Which THREE steps should they take?

Accepted Answer

Use a global load balancer with health checks. To protect against zonal failures: use a managed instance group across multiple zones (A) to distribute instances; use regional persistent disks (B) that replicate data across zones; and use a global load balancer with health checks (C) to direct traffic to healthy instances. Storing session state in memory (D) is not durable. Using a single zone instance group (E) does not provide HA.

Answer

Store session state in memory

Answer

Use a single zone instance group

Question 6

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 correct answer is C because 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.

Answer

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 7

A financial services company is designing a multi-region disaster recovery architecture for a critical application. The application runs on Compute Engine with a stateful backend using Cloud Spanner. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 1 hour, and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 15 minutes. What architecture meets these requirements cost-effectively?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the application in two regions with active-active traffic load balancing and Cloud Spanner multi-region configuration.. Option A is correct because it uses Cloud Spanner's multi-region configuration, which provides synchronous replication across regions with automatic failover, meeting an RPO of 15 minutes (typically seconds) and an RTO of 1 hour. Active-active traffic load balancing with Compute Engine ensures that the application can immediately route traffic to the healthy region, minimizing downtime without the need for manual failover or backup/restore operations.

Answer

Deploy in one region with scheduled snapshots to Cloud Storage and use persistent disk snapshots for recovery.

Answer

Deploy in two regions with active-passive using Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud Spanner backup/restore.

Answer

Use a single region with Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and enable cross-region replication using Cloud SQL replica.

Question 8

A multinational corporation operates in multiple regions and must comply with GDPR. They use Cloud Load Balancing to distribute traffic across regional backends. Their security team wants to block traffic from specific countries (e.g., non-EU countries) at the edge. What should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Armor security policies with geographic-based denylist rules.. Cloud Armor security policies support geographic-based access control using denylist or allowlist rules that match client IP addresses against country-level geolocation data. This allows the security team to block traffic from specific countries at the edge, before it reaches the backend, which is the most efficient and compliant approach for GDPR enforcement.

Answer

Configure Cloud CDN to serve content only to EU-based users.

Answer

Set VPC firewall rules to allow traffic only from EU IP ranges.

Answer

Configure Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) to require user authentication from allowed countries.

Question 9

Which THREE are valid methods to protect sensitive data in BigQuery?

Accepted Answer

Apply Cloud DLP de-identification transforms during data ingestion.. Cloud DLP de-identification transforms can be applied during data ingestion to automatically mask, tokenize, or redact sensitive data before it is stored in BigQuery. This ensures that sensitive information is protected at rest and is not accessible to unauthorized users, aligning with data security best practices.

Answer

Enable customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) to encrypt sensitive columns.

Answer

Use IAM roles to grant access at the dataset level, which automatically masks sensitive data.

Question 10

Which THREE options are valid strategies for disaster recovery (DR) in Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a mirrored environment in another region and use Traffic Director to fail over.. Option B is correct because Traffic Director, based on the xDS API (Envoy), can manage traffic routing across regions. By deploying a mirrored environment in another region and configuring Traffic Director with failover policies, you can redirect traffic to the secondary region if the primary fails, enabling a robust active-passive or active-active DR strategy.

Answer

Store hourly snapshots of Compute Engine disks in the same region.

Answer

Enable Cloud CDN to cache static content from multiple origins.

Question 11

An organization has a VPC with two subnets: subnet-a (10.0.1.0/24) and subnet-b (10.0.2.0/24). They launched a Compute Engine instance in subnet-a with an internal IP 10.0.1.2 and a public IP. They want the instance to only allow HTTPS traffic from the internet. Which firewall rule should they create?

Accepted Answer

Ingress rule: allow tcp:443, source 0.0.0.0/0, target tag 'https-server'. Option D is correct because the instance needs to accept incoming HTTPS traffic (TCP port 443) from the internet. An ingress firewall rule with source 0.0.0.0/0 allows traffic from any external IP, and applying it to instances with the target tag 'https-server' ensures only tagged instances are affected. This matches the requirement to allow only HTTPS from the internet.

Answer

Ingress rule: allow tcp:0-65535, source 0.0.0.0/0, target tag 'https-server'

Answer

Egress rule: allow tcp:443, destination 0.0.0.0/0, target tag 'https-server'

Answer

Ingress rule: allow tcp:443, source 10.0.0.0/16, target tag 'https-server'

Question 12

An organization uses Cloud SQL for MySQL in a production environment. They need to ensure high availability with automatic failover in case of a zonal failure. Which configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

Create a regional Cloud SQL instance with automatic failover.. A regional Cloud SQL instance with automatic failover uses a primary and a standby zone within the same region, with synchronous replication between them. If the primary zone fails, Cloud SQL automatically promotes the standby to primary, ensuring high availability without data loss. This configuration meets the requirement for automatic failover during a zonal failure.

Answer

Create a read replica in a different region.

Answer

Export the database daily and import into a new instance if failure occurs.

Answer

Deploy Cloud SQL across multiple regions using cross-region replication.

Question 13

A healthcare organization uses Cloud Storage to store protected health information (PHI). They have a compliance requirement to ensure that all objects in the bucket are encrypted with a customer-managed key (CMK) that is rotated every 90 days. They also need to log all access to the bucket and detect anomalous access patterns. Which combination of Google Cloud services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Storage with CMEK via Cloud KMS, Cloud Audit Logs, and Chronicle. Option D is correct because Cloud Storage with CMEK via Cloud KMS allows the organization to use a customer-managed key that can be rotated every 90 days, meeting the compliance requirement. Cloud Audit Logs capture all access to the bucket, and Chronicle provides advanced security analytics to detect anomalous access patterns, fulfilling the logging and detection needs.

Answer

Cloud Storage with default encryption, Cloud Audit Logs, and Security Command Center

Answer

Cloud Storage with CMEK via Cloud HSM, Cloud Audit Logs, and Cloud DLP

Answer

Cloud Storage with CSEK, Cloud Audit Logs, and Security Command Center

Question 14

A company uses a Shared VPC hosted in a common project (host project) to centralize network management. A service project team needs to create a Compute Engine instance with a specific static internal IP address from the Shared VPC subnet. What IAM permissions should be granted to the service project's Compute Engine default service account?

Accepted Answer

compute.subnetworks.use and compute.addresses.use on the subnet and static IP.. Option B is correct: To use a specific static internal IP from a Shared VPC, the service account needs compute.subnetworks.use and compute.addresses.use on the subnet or address resource. Option A is missing compute.addresses.use. Option C grants compute.instances.create but not the necessary subnet/address permissions. Option D is too broad and unnecessary.

Answer

compute.networkAdmin on the host project.

Answer

compute.subnetworks.use on the host project subnet.

Answer

compute.instances.create on the service project.

Question 15

An organization wants to enforce a policy that prohibits the creation of Cloud Storage buckets with uniform bucket-level access disabled. What should they use?

Accepted Answer

Organization policy with a list constraint.. Option C is correct: Organization policies can enforce constraints like constraints/storage.uniformBucketLevelAccess. Option A (IAM) does not prevent bucket creation with specific settings. Option B (Cloud Audit Logs) is for logging. Option D (Cloud Armor) is for security policies at the edge.

Answer

IAM roles with custom permissions to deny bucket creation.

Answer

Cloud Audit Logs to monitor bucket creation.

Answer

Cloud Armor security policies.

Question 16

An administrator creates a GKE cluster with the command above. After deployment, the cluster has 3 nodes, but the node pool autoscaler never scales up even under load. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The cluster is zonal, but node locations include multiple zones.. Option C is correct because the node pool autoscaler in GKE cannot scale up a cluster that uses multiple zones in a single zonal cluster. The autoscaler requires that all nodes in the pool be in the same zone to properly manage capacity; when node locations span multiple zones in a zonal cluster, the autoscaler is disabled and will not trigger scaling events, even under load.

Answer

The autoscaler minimum nodes is set to 1 and maximum to 5.

Answer

The disk size of 100 GB is insufficient.

Answer

The machine type e2-medium is too small for the workloads.

Question 17

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine instances in a managed instance group (MIG) across three zones in us-central1. The application uses a Cloud Spanner database. Recently, the application experienced increased latency and timeouts during peak hours. The operations team noticed that the MIG's CPU utilization is consistently above 80% during peak hours, and the autoscaler is configured to scale based on CPU utilization with a target of 60%. However, the autoscaler is not adding new instances quickly enough, causing performance degradation. The team also observed that new instances take over 5 minutes to become healthy and serve traffic. The health check is a simple TCP check on port 8080. The application startup script downloads large configuration files from Cloud Storage. What should the team do to improve the autoscaling response time and reduce latency?

Accepted Answer

Create a custom Compute Engine image that includes the application and configuration, and use it in the MIG.. Option C is correct because the primary bottleneck is the long instance startup time (over 5 minutes) caused by downloading large configuration files from Cloud Storage at boot. By creating a custom Compute Engine image that bakes the application and configuration into the image, new instances can start serving traffic almost immediately, drastically reducing the time before they become healthy and the autoscaler can consider them in scaling decisions. This directly addresses the root cause of slow autoscaling response, as the autoscaler cannot add instances faster than they become healthy.

Answer

Increase the minimum number of instances in the MIG to handle peak load.

Answer

Reduce the autoscaler target CPU utilization to 40% so it scales earlier.

Answer

Change the health check to HTTP and reduce the initial delay and check intervals.

Question 18

An organization is implementing a data loss prevention (DLP) strategy for sensitive data stored in Cloud Storage. They want to automatically detect and redact credit card numbers in CSV files uploaded to a specific bucket. Which TWO Google Cloud services should they combine to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Cloud DLP. Cloud DLP (option C) is correct because it provides native content inspection and de-identification (redaction) of sensitive data like credit card numbers using built-in infoType detectors. Cloud Functions (option D) is correct because it can be triggered by Cloud Storage events (e.g., finalize/create) to invoke the DLP API on newly uploaded CSV files, enabling serverless, event-driven processing without managing infrastructure.

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Answer

Cloud Run

Answer

BigQuery

Question 19

A company has a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance that is experiencing high latency. They suspect a connection pooling issue. Which TWO configurations should be checked? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL Auth Proxy configuration. The Cloud SQL proxy provides secure connections and connection pooling to reduce latency. The max_connections parameter affects how many connections are allowed and can be a bottleneck. Query insights helps but is not a configuration. Private IP vs public IP affects network path but not connection pooling per se.

Answer

Private IP assignment

Answer

Database query insights

Answer

Database version

Question 20

An organization is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application currently runs on a single server with an on-premises database. The application is stateful and requires low-latency access to the database. The migration must minimize downtime and ensure high availability. Which architecture should the company adopt?

Accepted Answer

Deploy on Compute Engine with a regional persistent disk and use Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with regional high availability.. Option B is correct because it combines Compute Engine with a regional persistent disk for synchronous replication across zones, ensuring high availability with minimal downtime during a zonal failure. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with regional high availability provides a managed, low-latency database with automatic failover, meeting the stateful application's need for low-latency access and high availability without the complexity of container orchestration.

Answer

Deploy on GKE with StatefulSets and use Cloud Spanner for global consistency.

Answer

Deploy on App Engine Standard Environment and use Cloud Firestore in Datastore mode.

Answer

Deploy on Cloud Run and use Cloud SQL with read replicas.