Google PCA Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability Practice Test 7 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Your company wants to implement a canary deployment for a microservice running on GKE. You need to gradually shift traffic from the stable version to the canary version while monitoring error rates. Which THREE components or practices should you use? (Choose 3)

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud Deploy with an automated canary strategy and verification. Option A is correct because Cloud Deploy natively supports canary deployment strategies with configurable phases (for example, 50% then 100%) and automated verification that can advance or halt a rollout based on analysis results. Option B is correct because Cloud Monitoring collects the error-rate metrics (such as HTTP 5xx ratios from the service) that Cloud Deploy's verification step or alerting policies use to detect failures and trigger a rollback. Option E is correct because Istio on GKE provides fine-grained traffic splitting via VirtualService weights, letting you shift a precise percentage of requests from the stable to the canary version while observing behavior. Option C is not appropriate because Cloud CDN caches responses at the edge and does not perform version-based traffic shifting or canary analysis. Option D is not appropriate because feature flags toggle functionality inside a single deployed version and do not by themselves implement gradual traffic shifting between two separately deployed versions.

Answer

Cloud CDN for caching responses

Answer

Feature flags in the application code

Question 2

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). Point-in-time recovery (PITR) for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL lets you restore an instance to any specific timestamp within a configurable retention window (up to 7 days), using write-ahead log (WAL) archiving combined with automated backups. This directly satisfies the requirement to recover to a specific point in time within the last 7 days with an RPO under 1 hour, because WAL segments are continuously shipped and enable granular recovery. Automated backups alone only allow restore to the backup's snapshot time, which would not meet a sub-hour RPO.

Answer

Exporting the database daily to Cloud Storage

Answer

Failover replica

Answer

Automated backups only

Question 3

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, Google Cloud requires two Dedicated Interconnect connections in different edge locations (or two Partner Interconnect connections in different metros). This redundant topology eliminates single points of failure at the interconnect level, meeting the SLA for 99.99% availability. A single connection, regardless of bandwidth, cannot meet this SLA.

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 4

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. None of the listed gcloud commands shows current resource utilization of GKE nodes. gcloud container clusters describe shows configuration, gcloud container clusters list lists clusters, gcloud container clusters get-credentials retrieves credentials, and gcloud compute instances list only lists instances and their status. The correct command for current CPU/memory utilization is kubectl top nodes.

Answer

gcloud container clusters describe

Answer

gcloud container clusters list

Answer

gcloud container clusters get-credentials

Question 5

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. In GKE Autopilot, nodes are fully managed by Google, so the team cannot create or resize node pools. The correct lever is to set appropriate CPU and memory requests (and limits) in the pod specification so the scheduler and Autopilot's autoscaler provision nodes with sufficient capacity. Autopilot uses the requests to bin-pack pods and to decide when to add nodes, so undersized requests cause intermittent failures under load.

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 6

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 7

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 8

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. Cloud Logging sinks support three destination types: Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub (plus custom destinations via Pub/Sub or Logging API). BigQuery is the correct choice here because the requirement is long-term analysis of log data, and BigQuery provides a fully managed, serverless data warehouse with SQL querying, partitioning, and clustering capabilities ideal for analytical workloads on exported logs.

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Pub/Sub

Answer

Custom HTTP endpoint

Question 9

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 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 10

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. Option B is correct because canary deployments with traffic splitting (e.g., via GKE Ingress, Anthos Service Mesh, or Istio VirtualService weights) let the team expose a new version to a small percentage of traffic, validating performance on real workloads before full rollout. Option C is correct because feature flags decouple deployment from release, allowing features to be toggled dynamically without redeploying, which supports fast rollback by disabling a flag rather than reverting a build. Option E is correct because Cloud Deploy supports automated rollback policies tied to rollout failures or verification results, enabling rapid, deterministic rollback of a bad release. Option A is wrong because deploying directly to production bypasses validation and contradicts the requirement to test performance before full rollout. Option D is wrong because manual monitoring and rollback is slow, error-prone, and does not meet the goal of rolling back quickly compared to automated policies.

Answer

Deploy changes directly to production

Answer

Manually monitor and roll back if issues appear

Question 11

A company has a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance in a single zone. To achieve high availability, they want to ensure automatic failover with zero data loss and minimal downtime. Which configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

Configure a Cloud SQL regional instance with a failover replica in a different zone. A Cloud SQL regional instance provisions a standby replica in a different zone within the same region and performs automatic failover with synchronous replication, ensuring zero data loss (RPO=0) and minimal downtime. This is the standard HA configuration for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL.

Answer

Deploy a read replica in the same zone and enable automatic failover

Answer

Enable automatic backups and point-in-time recovery

Answer

Add a cross-region read replica and configure failover manually

Question 12

A company uses Cloud Logging to capture application logs. They need to alert when the number of errors exceeds 100 in a 5-minute window. Which type of alert should they create?

Accepted Answer

Log-based metric with an alerting policy. To alert on the count of error log entries exceeding 100 in a 5-minute window, the engineer must first create a log-based metric that counts matching log entries, then attach an alerting policy with a threshold condition on that metric. Cloud Logging alone cannot alert on log content; it must be converted into a metric that Cloud Monitoring can evaluate. This is the standard pattern for log-driven alerting in Google Cloud.

Answer

Notification channel with email integration

Answer

Cloud Logging sink to a Pub/Sub topic

Answer

SLO alerting policy

Question 13

An engineer needs to list all Compute Engine instances in a project using the command line. Which gcloud command should they use?

Accepted Answer

gcloud compute instances list. The correct command to list Compute Engine instances is 'gcloud compute instances list'. The other options are incorrect: 'gcloud compute machine-types list' lists machine types, 'gcloud compute instance-groups list' lists instance groups, and 'gcloud compute instances describe' describes a specific instance.

Answer

gcloud compute instances describe

Answer

gcloud compute instance-groups list

Answer

gcloud compute machine-types list

Question 14

An organization uses Cloud Storage to store critical documents. They want to protect against accidental deletion or overwriting of objects. Which feature should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Object versioning and retention policies. Object versioning and retention policies together protect against accidental deletion and overwrites. Versioning keeps multiple versions of objects, and retention policies prevent deletion until a specified time. Uniform bucket-level access is for access control, not protection. Object lifecycle management automates transitions/deletion, not protection. Encryption protects data at rest.

Answer

Uniform bucket-level access

Answer

Object lifecycle management rules

Answer

Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)

Question 15

A company has a Cloud SQL for MySQL instance with automated backups enabled. They need to recover the database to a specific point in time within the last hour. Which feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Point-in-time recovery (PITR). Point-in-time recovery (PITR) lets Cloud SQL for MySQL restore to a specific timestamp within the retention window by combining automated backups with binary logs. It is the only option that supports recovery to an arbitrary point within the last hour. Automated backup restore only returns the database to the time of the last backup, not an arbitrary point.

Answer

Failover replica

Answer

Automated backup restore

Answer

Import using the mysqldump file