Google PCA Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for their Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. They need to recover the database to a specific point in time within the last 7 days, with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 hour. Which feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Point-in-time recovery (PITR). Cloud SQL automated backups combined with point-in-time recovery (PITR) allow recovery to any point in time within the backup retention period (default 7 days) by using transaction logs. PITR enables RPO of less than 1 hour because it uses write-ahead logs.

Answer

Exporting the database daily to Cloud Storage

Answer

Failover replica

Answer

Automated backups only

Question 2

An organization is using Cloud Interconnect to connect their on-premises network to Google Cloud. They need to ensure 99.99% availability for their connection. Which configuration meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Two Dedicated Interconnect connections from different edge locations. To achieve 99.99% availability with Cloud Interconnect, you need two Dedicated Interconnect connections from different edge locations. This provides redundancy and meets the SLA requirement. A single connection (Dedicated or Partner) does not meet the 99.99% SLA. HA VPN is not a Cloud Interconnect solution; it's a separate VPN service that can also provide 99.99% SLA but is not Cloud Interconnect. Since the organization is using Cloud Interconnect, the correct configuration is two Dedicated Interconnect connections from different edge locations.

Answer

A single Partner Interconnect connection at 1Gbps

Answer

A single Dedicated Interconnect connection at 10Gbps

Answer

High Availability VPN (HA VPN) with two gateways and four tunnels

Question 3

During a load test, an application running on GKE experiences high latency and errors. You suspect the issue is due to insufficient cluster resources. Which gcloud command should you use to quickly check the current resource utilization of all nodes in the cluster?

Accepted Answer

gcloud compute instances list. To quickly check the current resource utilization of all nodes in a GKE cluster using gcloud, the best command among the options is gcloud compute instances list. This command lists all compute instances (including GKE nodes) with their status. You can see if nodes are running or in error state, which can indicate resource issues. However, note that this command does not provide actual CPU or memory utilization metrics; for that you would use kubectl top nodes. The other options either do not list nodes (gcloud container clusters list, get-credentials) or only show cluster configuration (gcloud container clusters describe).

Answer

gcloud container clusters describe

Answer

gcloud container clusters list

Answer

gcloud container clusters get-credentials

Question 4

A company wants to implement canary deployments on GKE to gradually roll out a new version of a microservice. They need to route a small percentage of traffic to the new version initially. Which tool can they use to achieve traffic splitting?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Deploy with a Service Mesh like Istio. Cloud Deploy supports canary deployments with traffic splitting using Service Mesh (Istio) or other ingresses. Istio itself can also be used directly. Cloud Load Balancing can do traffic splitting but not as part of a deployment pipeline. Cloud Shell is just a terminal. Cloud Deployment Manager is for infrastructure deployment.

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing

Answer

Cloud Shell

Answer

Cloud Deployment Manager

Question 5

You are configuring a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy to notify your SRE team when the error rate of a service exceeds 5% over a 5-minute window. Which type of metric evaluation should you use?

Accepted Answer

Window-based. A window-based metric evaluation (e.g., rate, ratio, or count over a sliding window) is appropriate for error rate over a 5-minute window. Request-based is for latency SLOs.

Answer

Log-based

Answer

Request-based

Answer

Health check-based

Question 6

A company uses Cloud Storage to store backup files. They need to retain backups for 7 years and must be able to recover deleted or overwritten files within that period. Which Cloud Storage feature should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Object versioning. Object versioning keeps multiple versions of an object, allowing recovery from deletion or overwrite. Object retention policies prevent deletion but do not allow recovery of overwritten versions. Lifecycle management is for automation. Uniform bucket-level access is for permissions.

Answer

Object retention policy

Answer

Lifecycle management

Answer

Uniform bucket-level access

Question 7

An application running on GKE Autopilot is experiencing intermittent failures due to resource limits. The team wants to ensure that the application always has enough CPU and memory without manual node management. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Increase the resource requests and limits in the pod specification. GKE Autopilot manages nodes automatically. To ensure resources, they should adjust the resource requests and limits in the pod spec. GKE Autopilot automatically scales nodes based on pod resource requests. They do not need to manage node pools. Increasing machine type is not possible directly in Autopilot.

Answer

Use horizontal pod autoscaling only

Answer

Create a new node pool with larger machine types

Answer

Switch to GKE Standard and manage node pools manually

Question 8

To achieve a 99.999% availability SLA for a globally distributed application using Cloud Spanner, which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Multi-region instance configuration. Cloud Spanner multi-region configuration provides 99.999% SLA. Single-region offers 99.99%. Fine-grained access control and customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) do not affect availability SLA.

Answer

Fine-grained access control

Answer

Single-region instance configuration

Answer

Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)

Question 9

A company is planning a phased migration of their on-premises database to Cloud SQL. They want to minimize downtime and ensure data consistency. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use Database Migration Service (DMS). Database Migration Service (DMS) supports continuous replication with minimal downtime. Export and import involves downtime. Lift-and-shift is not a GCP service. VM migration is for servers, not databases.

Answer

Lift and shift the database server to Compute Engine

Answer

Export the database to a SQL dump file and import into Cloud SQL

Answer

Use VM migration to move the database server

Question 10

You are responsible for post-incident reviews. After a major outage, your team identifies that the root cause was a misconfiguration in a deployment pipeline that caused an incorrect rollout. Which step should be included in the postmortem process?

Accepted Answer

Define action items to prevent recurrence and improve detection. Postmortems should identify root cause, document timeline, and define action items to prevent recurrence. Blaming individuals is counterproductive. Only documenting the timeline is insufficient. Ignoring is not acceptable.

Answer

Ignore the incident and move on

Answer

Document the timeline of events and the root cause

Answer

Assign blame to the engineer who made the mistake

Question 11

You need to create a Cloud Logging sink that exports logs to a BigQuery dataset for long-term analysis. Which destination type should you specify?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is a supported sink destination. Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and custom HTTP endpoints are also supported, but for analysis in BigQuery, you specify BigQuery as the destination.

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Pub/Sub

Answer

Custom HTTP endpoint

Question 12

An application running on Compute Engine is experiencing increased latency. You suspect a network bottleneck due to high egress traffic. Which gcloud command can you use to quickly check the network egress traffic for a specific VM instance?

Accepted Answer

gcloud logging read 'resource.type=gce_instance AND jsonPayload.egress_bytes'. The correct answer is A. The gcloud logging read command allows you to query Cloud Logging for specific log entries. For a Compute Engine instance, the resource type is gce_instance. You can filter for egress bytes by using the query 'resource.type=gce_instance AND jsonPayload.egress_bytes'. This will return log entries containing egress bytes information, assuming your VM is configured to send these logs (e.g., via the monitoring agent or VPC flow logs). This is the quickest way among the given options to check network egress traffic for a specific VM using a native gcloud command.

Option B is incorrect: gcloud compute instances list only displays the network IP of instances, not egress traffic metrics.
Option C is incorrect: gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output shows the serial console output, which does not include network traffic data.
Option D is incorrect: gcloud monitoring metrics list just lists available metrics but does not retrieve the actual traffic data for a specific instance. To get the data you would need to use gcloud monitoring metric descriptors or gcloud monitoring dashboards, but the command as given does not return traffic.

Thus, A is the best choice.

Answer

gcloud compute instances list --format='value(networkInterfaces[0].networkIP)'

Answer

gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output

Answer

gcloud monitoring metrics list

Question 13

A company is deploying a critical application on GKE and needs to ensure high availability for the Kubernetes control plane and etcd data. Which TWO approaches should they implement? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Use a regional GKE cluster with multiple zones. GKE automatically manages control plane availability with regional clusters. For etcd backups, using Velero is a standard approach. Increasing node size does not improve control plane availability. Manual control plane management is not needed in GKE. Single-zone clusters do not provide HA.

Answer

Manually manage the control plane on Compute Engine

Answer

Increase the machine type of the node pool

Answer

Use a single-zone cluster with a large node pool

Question 14

An organization needs to implement a change management process for a mission-critical application on GKE. They want to validate performance before full rollout and be able to roll back quickly. Which THREE practices should they adopt? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Implement canary deployments with traffic splitting. Phased rollouts (canary) and gradual traffic shifting allow validation and rollback. Feature flags enable toggling features without redeployment. Automated rollback policies ensure quick recovery. Direct rollout to production is risky. Manual rollback is slow.

Answer

Deploy changes directly to production

Answer

Manually monitor and roll back if issues appear

Question 15

A company is designing a DR strategy for their GKE workloads. They need to back up application data and cluster configuration. Which THREE resources should they include in their backup plan? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

etcd snapshot via Velero. PersistentVolume data (application data), Kubernetes resource manifests (deployments, services), and etcd snapshots (cluster state) are essential. Node images can be recreated from configuration. Service accounts are IAM entities and not typically backed up as part of cluster backup.

Answer

Service account keys for the cluster

Answer

Compute Engine node images