Google PCA Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A startup wants to run a containerized web application that scales to zero when not in use and charges only for request processing time. Which compute service is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that scales down to zero and charges per request, making it ideal for variable workloads that need to minimize cost when idle.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (Autopilot)

Answer

Compute Engine with preemptible VMs

Answer

App Engine Standard

Question 2

A financial services company must run a PostgreSQL database with strong consistency across three regions. They need to support high write throughput and require automatic failover with zero data loss. Which database service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the only Google Cloud managed database that provides globally distributed, strongly consistent transactions with automatic failover and zero data loss via multi-region configurations.

Answer

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL

Answer

Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with cross-region replication

Question 3

An organization wants to establish a dedicated, low-latency connection between their on-premises data center and GCP with a guaranteed SLA of 99.99% uptime. They anticipate high bandwidth usage but want to avoid per-GB egress charges. Which connectivity option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Cloud Interconnect. Dedicated Cloud Interconnect provides a direct physical connection with SLA up to 99.99%, high bandwidth, and no egress charges, ideal for high-volume hybrid workloads.

Answer

Partner Cloud Interconnect

Answer

Cloud VPN with HA VPN gateway

Answer

Classic VPN

Question 4

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 5

A company needs to store archival data that is accessed less than once a year, with retrieval times of up to 12 hours acceptable. The data must be kept for 10 years for compliance. What is the most cost-effective Cloud Storage solution?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Storage Archive class with a lifecycle policy that deletes objects after 10 years. Cloud Storage Archive class is the most cost-effective option for data accessed less than once a year with retrieval times up to 12 hours, as it offers the lowest storage cost among Google Cloud Storage classes. A lifecycle policy that deletes objects after 10 years ensures compliance with the retention requirement without incurring ongoing storage costs beyond the mandated period.

Answer

Cloud Storage Coldline class with a retention policy

Answer

Cloud Storage Nearline class

Answer

Cloud Storage Standard class with object versioning

Question 6

A developer needs to build a serverless event-driven application that responds to Cloud Storage object uploads by processing the file and storing results in Firestore. Which compute service is the best fit?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is a serverless event-driven compute service that can be triggered directly by Cloud Storage events, ideal for simple processing tasks.

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos

Answer

Compute Engine with startup scripts

Question 7

Which Google Cloud service provides a fully managed, auto-scaling environment for running stateless HTTP(S) web applications using a variety of supported programming languages?

Accepted Answer

App Engine Standard. App Engine Standard is the correct choice because it is a fully managed, auto-scaling platform specifically designed for stateless HTTP(S) web applications. It supports multiple programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Go, PHP, Node.js) and automatically handles scaling, load balancing, and patching, allowing developers to focus on code without managing infrastructure.

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine

Answer

Compute Engine

Question 8

A company wants to migrate its on-premises Oracle database to GCP with minimal changes. They require a fully managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database that offers high performance for analytics and AI workloads. Which service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

AlloyDB. AlloyDB is a fully managed PostgreSQL-compatible database optimized for high performance analytics and AI, with support for vector embeddings and other AI features.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

Question 9

A global e-commerce platform uses Cloud Spanner for product inventory and wants to reduce costs. They notice that read replicas are underutilized and that most queries are single-key reads. Which configuration change will reduce costs while maintaining availability?

Accepted Answer

Downgrade the instance to a smaller regional configuration with fewer nodes. For Spanner, read replicas are used for read-only workloads; if underutilized, reducing the number of read replicas can lower costs without affecting write availability. However, fine-grained instance configuration changes are not straightforward; the best option is to adjust the number of nodes or use a smaller instance class. But among options, choosing a smaller regional configuration (fewer nodes) is practical.

Answer

Use Cloud SQL for reads and Spanner for writes only

Answer

Switch to a multi-region configuration with witness nodes

Answer

Reduce the number of read replicas in the instance configuration

Question 10

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?

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 11

A developer needs to cache session state for a web application to reduce latency. The cache must be highly available and support sub-millisecond access times. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Memorystore for Redis. Memorystore for Redis provides a managed in-memory cache with sub-millisecond latency and supports high availability with replication.

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Bigtable

Question 12

A company wants to deploy a containerized microservices application on GCP with minimal operational overhead. They need automatic scaling, no node management, and pay only for requested resources. Which compute option is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that scales automatically, requires no node management, and charges per request.

Answer

GKE Standard with node auto-provisioning

Answer

GKE Autopilot

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 13

A company runs a web application on GKE and wants to expose it to the internet using a global HTTP(S) load balancer with Cloud CDN. Which TWO GCP resources are required to configure this setup? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Kubernetes Ingress resource with a GCE ingress controller. A is correct because a Kubernetes Ingress resource with a GCE ingress controller is required to integrate a GKE application with a global HTTP(S) load balancer. The GCE ingress controller provisions a Google Cloud HTTP(S) load balancer and configures the necessary forwarding rules, URL maps, and backend services to route external traffic to the appropriate Kubernetes Services. This setup is essential for enabling Cloud CDN, which caches content at Google's global edge points.

Answer

Cloud NAT gateway

Answer

A Kubernetes Service of type LoadBalancer

Answer

Cloud VPN tunnel

Question 14

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 15

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