Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company uses Cloud Interconnect to connect on-premises network to GCP. They want to ensure that if one interconnect link fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to another link. Which configuration should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Create a second interconnect in a different metro and use BGP with MED.. Option D is correct because using a second interconnect in a different metro with BGP MED (Multi-Exit Discriminator) allows you to influence inbound traffic path selection and provides true geographic redundancy. If one interconnect link fails, BGP withdraws the routes, and traffic automatically fails over to the remaining interconnect via the alternate path, ensuring high availability without relying on a single point of failure.

Answer

Configure BGP sessions with equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) over multiple interconnect links.

Answer

Use a VPN as backup for the interconnect.

Answer

Use a single VLAN attachment with multiple interconnect links.

Answer

Use multiple VLAN attachments with the same interconnect.

Question 2

A company runs a batch process every night that loads data into BigQuery. They want to ensure that if the job fails, it is retried automatically up to 3 times. Which configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Composer (Airflow) tasks with retries.. Option E is correct because Cloud Composer (Airflow) natively supports task-level retries via the `retries` parameter in task definitions, allowing you to specify up to 3 automatic retries on failure. This is the appropriate choice for orchestrating a batch process that loads data into BigQuery, as Airflow provides robust retry logic, dependency management, and monitoring for complex workflows.

Answer

Cloud Run jobs with --max-retries=3.

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Cloud Scheduler with retry policy.

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BigQuery load job with maximum retries setting.

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Cloud Functions with error handling.

Question 3

A company runs a critical application on a Compute Engine instance. They want to ensure that the application remains available even if the instance crashes. Which two GCP features should they use? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Instance template with automatic restart.. Option C is correct because an instance template with automatic restart enables Compute Engine to automatically restart a VM instance if it crashes or is terminated due to a non-user-initiated failure. This feature is configured at the instance level and ensures that the application recovers quickly without manual intervention, improving availability for a single-instance workload.

Answer

Regular snapshots of the persistent disk.

Answer

A load balancer distributing traffic to a single instance.

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A Cloud CDN to cache static content.

Question 4

An organization deploys a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with multiple Deployments. They want to ensure that the application remains available during a cluster-wide upgrade. Which three best practices should they follow? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use multiple node pools across different zones.. Option C is correct because deploying node pools across multiple zones ensures that GKE can perform a cluster-wide upgrade by upgrading nodes in one zone at a time, maintaining application availability as long as the workload is replicated across zones. This leverages GKE's zonal upgrade strategy, which upgrades nodes in a single zone before moving to the next, preventing simultaneous disruption of all replicas.

Answer

Enable cluster autoscaling.

Answer

Use StatefulSets instead of Deployments for all services.

Answer

Use node pools with multiple node types.

Question 5

A company uses Cloud Storage to store user-uploaded content. They want to ensure that the data is highly durable and protected against accidental deletion. Which two features should they enable? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Object versioning.. Options A and B are correct: Object versioning preserves previous versions, and retention policy prevents deletion until the retention period ends. Option C lifecycle management is for automated deletion. Option D requester pays is for billing. Option E uniform bucket-level access is for access control.

Answer

Requester pays.

Answer

Lifecycle management.

Answer

Uniform bucket-level access.

Question 6

A developer ran the above command to create a health check for a backend service. Which of the following should they do to resolve the error?

Accepted Answer

Use a different name for the health check.. Option E is correct because the error indicates that a health check with the same name already exists for the load balancer. In AWS, health check names must be unique within a load balancer. By using a different name, the developer can create a new health check without conflicting with the existing one.

Answer

Change the request-path to a different value.

Answer

Delete the existing health check and recreate it.

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Add the --global flag to the command.

Answer

Use --load-balancer-type internal to create a new health check with the same name.

Question 7

After deploying the above configuration, the application is not receiving traffic from the Kubernetes Service. The Service is correctly configured to target port 8080. What is the most likely issue?

Accepted Answer

The readiness probe is using HTTP but the container may not be ready on that path; change to TCP.. Option C is correct because the readiness probe is configured as an HTTP GET request, but the application container may not be serving traffic on the specified HTTP path at startup. If the application listens on a TCP port but does not respond to HTTP GET on that path, the readiness probe will fail, causing the Service to not route traffic to the Pod. Changing the readiness probe to a TCP socket check ensures the probe only verifies that the port is open, which is more reliable when the application does not expose an HTTP endpoint for health checks.

Answer

The initialDelaySeconds for readiness probe is too short; increase it.

Answer

The port name is not defined; add a name to the container port.

Answer

The image pull policy is not set to Always; new pods may use stale image.

Answer

The liveness probe uses tcpSocket; it should be HTTPGet.

Question 8

A company uses the above IAM policy on a Cloud Storage bucket. They find that Bob can view objects in the bucket. Which statement explains this?

Accepted Answer

Bob is a member of the group viewers@example.com.. Option D is correct because the IAM policy shown includes a binding that grants the `roles/storage.objectViewer` role to the group `viewers@example.com`. If Bob is a member of that group, he inherits the permissions to view objects in the bucket. The policy explicitly lists this group as a principal, so Bob's ability to view objects is directly explained by his group membership.

Answer

There is a higher-level policy that grants Bob viewer access.

Answer

The etag is mismatched causing policy override.

Answer

The bucket has uniform bucket-level access disabled.

Answer

The objectCreator role implicitly includes read access.

Question 9

Your company runs a stateless web application on Compute Engine. You want to ensure that if a zone fails, the application continues to serve traffic with minimal manual intervention. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.. A regional managed instance group (MIG) distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining zones continue serving traffic. Combined with a global Cloud Load Balancer, traffic is automatically routed to healthy instances in any zone, providing high availability with minimal manual intervention. Autoscaling further ensures that new instances are created to handle load, even if a zone becomes unavailable.

Answer

Schedule regular snapshots of each instance's persistent disk to a regional bucket.

Answer

Use a global Cloud Load Balancer and enable Cloud CDN.

Answer

Create an instance template and manually deploy instances in another zone.

Question 10

You are using Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. You want to ensure that data can be recovered to any point within the last 7 days. What should you enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable automated backups and set the backup configuration to enable binary logging (point-in-time recovery).. Option D is correct because enabling automated backups with binary logging (also known as write-ahead logging or WAL archiving) in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL allows point-in-time recovery (PITR). This lets you restore your database to any specific timestamp within the retention window, which you can set to 7 days. Automated backups alone only provide daily snapshot restores, not the granularity needed for recovery to any point in time.

Answer

Export the database daily to Cloud Storage.

Answer

Create a cross-region read replica.

Answer

Enable automated backups with a 7-day retention period.

Question 11

A developer wants to monitor the CPU usage of a single Compute Engine VM and receive alerts when it exceeds 80%. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Install the Cloud Monitoring agent and create an alerting policy based on the metric 'cpu.utilization'.. Option C is correct because the Cloud Monitoring agent (formerly Stackdriver agent) collects CPU utilization metrics from Compute Engine VMs and sends them to Cloud Monitoring. You can then create an alerting policy directly on the metric 'cpu.utilization' with a threshold of 80% without any custom scripting or additional infrastructure. This is the simplest and most native approach for a single VM.

Answer

Query the Compute Engine API periodically and check CPU usage.

Answer

Configure a Cloud Logging sink to BigQuery and set a scheduled query to detect high CPU.

Answer

Use the managed instance group's autoscaling metric to trigger a notification.

Question 12

Your company's global e-commerce platform uses a managed instance group (MIG) in us-central1 and a Cloud Load Balancer. Traffic has grown, and you want to improve availability by distributing load across multiple regions. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Create MIGs in additional regions and add them as backends to the existing global load balancer.. Option C is correct because a global external HTTP(S) load balancer can have backends in multiple regions. By creating managed instance groups (MIGs) in additional regions and adding them as backends to the existing global load balancer, you distribute traffic across regions, improving availability and reducing latency for users worldwide. This approach leverages the load balancer's anycast IP and cross-region load balancing capabilities.

Answer

Increase the machine type of the existing instances to handle more traffic.

Answer

Enable Cloud CDN to cache content closer to users.

Answer

Change the load balancer to global and configure a single backend.

Question 13

Your organization uses Cloud Spanner for a customer database with a 99.999% availability SLA. You need a Disaster Recovery plan that ensures data consistency with zero RPO in case of a region failure. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Use a multi-region instance configuration (e.g., nam-eur-asia) for the Spanner instance.. Option D is correct because Cloud Spanner multi-region instance configurations (e.g., nam-eur-asia) provide synchronous replication across multiple regions, ensuring strong global consistency and zero RPO. This architecture uses Paxos-based replication to commit writes only after they are durably stored in a majority of regions, so a region failure does not lose any committed data. The 99.999% availability SLA is met by automatic failover within the multi-region setup without manual intervention.

Answer

Use a single-region instance configuration and enable read replicas.

Answer

Export the database periodically to Cloud Storage and set up a cross-region load balancer.

Answer

Configure daily backups and store them in Cloud Storage in a different region.

Question 14

Your team manages a service with a 99.9% uptime SLO over a 30-day window. The error budget for this period is 43 minutes. In the first week, outages consumed 30 minutes of the budget. You are planning a new release. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Delay the release and focus on improving reliability to rebuild the error budget.. With only 13 minutes of error budget remaining after the first week, proceeding with the release (Option B) risks exhausting the budget entirely from any unforeseen issues, violating the 99.9% SLO. Delaying the release (Option C) allows the team to focus on reliability improvements, such as implementing canary deployments, adding circuit breakers, or enhancing monitoring with tools like Prometheus and Grafana, to rebuild the error budget over the remaining 23 days. This aligns with the principle of using error budgets to balance innovation with reliability, as defined in Google's SRE practices.

Answer

Reduce the SLO to 99.8% to increase the error budget.

Answer

Proceed with the release because the remaining budget is sufficient.

Answer

Release the feature but only to a small percentage of users.

Question 15

You are designing a Dataflow streaming pipeline for real-time event processing. The pipeline must be cost-effective while tolerating worker failures without data loss. Which configuration should you use?

Accepted Answer

Use FlexRS with preemptible workers and enable streaming engine.. Option C is correct because FlexRS (Flexible Resource Scheduling) allows you to use preemptible workers in a streaming pipeline, which significantly reduces cost while the Streaming Engine provides durable state storage and checkpointing to tolerate worker failures without data loss. Preemptible workers are cheaper but can be terminated at any time; the Streaming Engine ensures that pipeline state is preserved and processing can resume seamlessly from the last checkpoint.

Answer

Use a batch Dataflow job with preemptible workers.

Answer

Use high-memory machine types for all workers to avoid preemption.

Answer

Use a standard Dataflow job with non-preemptible workers.