Google PCA Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture Practice Test 6 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A startup is building a serverless application that processes events from Cloud Storage buckets. Each event triggers a Python function that resizes images. Which GCP compute service is MOST suitable for this event-driven workload?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is designed for event-driven, serverless compute. It can be triggered directly by Cloud Storage events (object finalize/create). Cloud Run requires HTTP invocation, App Engine is for web apps, and Compute Engine VMs require management.

Answer

Cloud Run

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

App Engine

Question 2

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 3

An e-commerce company is experiencing traffic spikes during flash sales. Their application runs on Compute Engine instances behind a TCP load balancer. They want to automatically scale the number of instances based on CPU utilization. Which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Create a managed instance group (MIG) with an autoscaling policy based on CPU utilization.. Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) with autoscaling based on CPU utilization is the correct approach. Cloud Functions and Cloud Run are not Compute Engine instance scaling. A global HTTP(S) Load Balancer is not required for TCP traffic.

Answer

Configure Cloud Run for autoscaling and rewrite the application to run in containers.

Answer

Create an unmanaged instance group with a static number of instances and configure Cloud CDN.

Answer

Use Cloud Functions to handle traffic spikes and redirect traffic from the load balancer.

Question 4

A financial services company requires a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency and horizontal scalability to serve a multi-region banking application. Write conflicts are rare. Which database should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the only Google Cloud database that provides global distribution, strong consistency, and horizontal scalability for relational workloads. It uses true-time technology for external consistency. Bigtable is NoSQL; Firestore is eventually consistent; Cloud SQL is regional.

Answer

Firestore in Native mode

Answer

Cloud SQL with cross-region replication

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

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

A media company stores large video files that are accessed infrequently (once a quarter) and must be retained for 10 years for compliance. They want to minimize storage cost. Which Cloud Storage class should they use?

Accepted Answer

Archive storage class. Archive storage is the lowest-cost class for data accessed less than once a year. It is ideal for long-term archival with 10-year retention. Standard is for frequent access, Nearline for 30 days, Coldline for 90 days. Archive is the cheapest for infrequent access.

Answer

Standard storage class

Answer

Coldline storage class

Answer

Nearline storage class

Question 7

A company is running a containerized application on Cloud Run and needs to handle long-running requests that may exceed Cloud Run's default timeout. They also need to use WebSocket connections. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Move WebSocket connections to Compute Engine and adjust Cloud Run timeout to 60 minutes for long requests.. Cloud Run allows configuring request timeout up to 60 minutes. However, WebSocket support is limited; Cloud Run does not support WebSocket connections natively. For WebSocket, they should consider GKE or Compute Engine. Thus, the correct answer is to adjust Cloud Run timeout max and move WebSocket to another service.

Answer

Use Cloud Functions with a HTTP trigger and increase the timeout to 60 minutes.

Answer

Deploy the application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a NodePort service to handle WebSocket natively.

Answer

Increase the Cloud Run container timeout to the maximum (60 minutes) and enable WebSocket support by setting an environment variable.

Question 8

A global gaming company deploys a leaderboard service using Cloud Spanner with a single-region configuration. They need a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 seconds and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 minute in the event of a regional outage. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Deploy Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration.. Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations provide automatic synchronous replication across regions, achieving RPO of near zero seconds and RTO of minutes (failover is automatic). Single-region does not provide cross-region failover. Multi-region is required for such low RPO/RTO. Backups are point-in-time and slower to restore. Compute Engine is irrelevant.

Answer

Set up a cross-region read replica using Cloud SQL.

Answer

Use Compute Engine instances in multiple zones with a global load balancer to replicate data.

Answer

Configure cross-region backups with a 5-second recovery window.

Question 9

A company is running a stateful application on Compute Engine with local SSDs for low-latency writes. They want to perform a rolling update without losing data stored on the local SSDs. Which strategy is MOST appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the application to use persistent disks for data storage, then perform rolling updates.. Local SSDs are ephemeral; data is lost when the instance stops. To persist data, use persistent disks or migrate data to a persistent disk first. Rolling updates with local SSDs will lose data on terminated instances. The best approach is to change the application to use persistent disks, which survive instance termination.

Answer

Perform a rolling update using a managed instance group with a canary target; data on local SSDs will be preserved because the instance is only updated.

Answer

Use a stateful managed instance group with preserved local SSDs.

Answer

Snapshot the local SSDs before the update and restore after each instance update.

Question 10

A company uses Cloud Storage for analytics data with lifecycle policies to move objects from Standard to Coldline after 30 days and delete after 365 days. They notice that objects are being deleted after 30 days instead of 365. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The lifecycle rule is set to delete objects after 30 days instead of transitioning to Coldline.. Lifecycle rules apply in order; if a rule is set to delete after 30 days, it will delete regardless of earlier transitions. The most likely issue is that the rules are configured incorrectly: there may be a delete rule with age 30 days overriding the transition rule. The correct order should be: transition to Coldline at 30 days, then delete at 365 days.

Answer

An IAM policy is inadvertently allowing users to delete objects.

Answer

The Coldline storage class has a minimum storage duration of 30 days, causing immediate deletion.

Answer

The bucket is using a uniform bucket-level access policy.

Question 11

A company wants to connect their on-premises data center to Google Cloud with a dedicated, low-latency, and highly available connection. They need bandwidth of 10 Gbps. Which option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Cloud Interconnect. Dedicated Cloud Interconnect provides direct physical connections between on-premises and Google's network with speeds up to 100 Gbps per link. It offers high availability and low latency. HA VPN is over the public internet, Partner Interconnect depends on a partner, and Classic VPN is older.

Answer

Classic VPN

Answer

HA VPN over the public internet

Answer

Partner Cloud Interconnect

Question 12

An organization wants to deploy a containerized microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and minimize operational overhead. They do not need to manage the node infrastructure and are willing to accept some limitations on node configuration. Which GKE mode should they choose?

Accepted Answer

GKE Autopilot mode. GKE Autopilot is a fully managed mode where Google manages the entire cluster infrastructure, including nodes. It abstracts away node management and automatically provisions, scales, and upgrades nodes. Standard mode requires manual node pool management. Cloud Run is serverless but not Kubernetes. Compute Engine is not container orchestration.

Answer

GKE Standard mode with zonal cluster

Answer

Compute Engine with container-optimized OS and instance groups

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos

Question 13

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 14

A company wants to implement a disaster recovery strategy for their critical workloads on GCP. They require an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 1 hour. Which THREE components should they include in their architecture? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Multi-region Cloud Storage bucket with object versioning. Multi-region Cloud Storage for backups or data replication, Cloud SQL cross-region replication for databases, and MIGs in a secondary region with a global load balancer for compute failover meet the RPO/RTO. Persistent disk snapshots copied across regions are too slow for 15-minute RPO. Cloud Spanner multi-region is possible but not listed; the combination of these three services provides the required RPO/RTO.

Answer

Persistent disk snapshots copied to a secondary region every 15 minutes

Answer

Cloud CDN to cache content and reduce latency

Question 15

A company runs a batch analytics job every hour on BigQuery. The job processes terabytes of data and the results are stored in Cloud Storage. The job must complete within 30 minutes. Which TWO actions can reduce query execution time? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Use a partitioned table based on the timestamp column. Using partitioned tables allows BigQuery to scan only relevant partitions, reducing data scanned and improving speed. Increasing slot capacity provides more compute resources for the query. Partition elimination reduces data scanned; using clustering can also help but is not listed. Caching results only helps if the query is repeated; the job runs hourly with new data. Using legacy SQL does not improve performance.

Answer

Use cached results from the previous run

Answer

Convert the query to use legacy SQL

Answer

Export the data to Cloud Storage and query with an external table