Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Test 6 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Which THREE options are valid strategies for disaster recovery (DR) in Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a mirrored environment in another region and use Traffic Director to fail over.. Option B is correct because deploying a mirrored environment in a second region and using Traffic Director for global load balancing and failover provides true cross-region DR, ensuring workloads survive a full regional outage. Option D is correct because a Cloud Storage bucket in a different region with Object Versioning enabled gives durable, geographically separated copies of data and protects against accidental deletion or overwrite, which is a valid DR strategy. Option E is correct because a Cloud SQL cross-region replica can be promoted to a standalone primary during a regional failure, restoring database availability in another region. Option A is not a valid DR strategy because snapshots stored in the same region are lost if that region fails, so they do not provide disaster recovery. Option C is not a DR strategy because Cloud CDN caching static content from multiple origins improves performance and availability but does not by itself recover from a regional disaster or protect stateful data.

Answer

Store hourly snapshots of Compute Engine disks in the same region.

Answer

Enable Cloud CDN to cache static content from multiple origins.

Question 2

A company has deployed a critical application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a Regional cluster (us-central1). The application uses a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database with a cross-region replica for disaster recovery. The SRE team needs to ensure that the application can survive a regional outage with minimal data loss. Which TWO actions should the team take to improve the reliability of the solution?

Accepted Answer

Configure the application to automatically promote the Cloud SQL cross-region replica to a primary instance when the primary region is unavailable.. To survive a regional outage with minimal data loss, two key actions are needed: (1) Automate promotion of the Cloud SQL cross-region replica to primary when the primary region fails (Option A) – this is the standard Cloud SQL DR procedure; automation via Cloud Functions/Cloud Run reduces RTO. Note that cross-region replication is asynchronous, so some data loss (replication lag) is possible. (2) Deploy a multi-region GKE cluster pair (primary and secondary) and use an external HTTP(S) load balancer with a backend service pointing to both clusters, combined with a DNS failover policy (Option C) – this allows the load balancer to detect primary region health and route traffic to the secondary region if needed. Options B is wrong because cross-region replication cannot be synchronous. Option D is wrong because a secondary cluster in the same region does not help during a regional outage. Option E is wrong because a TCP/UDP load balancer with latency-based routing does not provide failover based on region health.

Answer

Configure Cloud SQL cross-region replication to be synchronous to ensure zero data loss during failover.

Answer

Deploy a secondary GKE cluster in the same region as the primary to provide a hot standby that can take over immediately.

Answer

Use a TCP/UDP load balancer to route traffic to both regions based on latency.

Question 3

You are investigating a Vertex AI Workbench instance (instance-2) that is showing UNHEALTHY status. Based on the exhibit, what is the most likely cause of the issue?

Accepted Answer

The container image gcr.io/my-project/my-image:latest does not exist, or the service account used by the Workbench instance does not have storage.objectViewer access to the container registry.. The UNHEALTHY status in Vertex AI Workbench typically occurs when the instance fails to start its container. Option A is correct because the most likely cause is that the specified container image (gcr.io/my-project/my-image:latest) does not exist in Container Registry, or the service account attached to the instance lacks the storage.objectViewer role on the registry bucket. Without this permission, the instance cannot pull the image, leading to a container creation failure and an UNHEALTHY state. Options B, C, and D are less likely given the focus on the container image in the exhibit.

Answer

The container registry endpoint is blocked by a firewall rule that does not allow egress to gcr.io.

Answer

The instance's underlying Compute Engine resources are exhausted, causing the container creation to timeout.

Answer

The Workbench instance is using an outdated custom image that is not compatible with the latest runtime version.

Question 4

You are running a Kubernetes cluster in GKE with the default node pool configuration shown in the exhibit. Your application requires high disk I/O performance. You notice that the application is experiencing high latency for disk operations. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The default node pool uses pd-standard disks, which have low IOPS.. The default node pool in GKE uses pd-standard (standard persistent disk) which provides lower IOPS compared to pd-ssd. For applications requiring high disk I/O performance, pd-standard disks become a bottleneck, causing high latency. Upgrading to pd-ssd or using local SSDs would resolve this issue.

Answer

Node auto-repair is causing disk contention.

Answer

The OAuth scopes restrict disk access, causing high latency.

Answer

The machine type n1-standard-2 does not have enough CPU.

Question 5

Your company runs a critical application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with 5 nodes. The application experiences intermittent high latency every Friday afternoon. The team has ruled out infrastructure issues and suspects the application logic. You need to instrument the application to identify the root cause. Which approach should you take?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Monitoring to create custom metrics for application performance and investigate recent code changes.. The team has already ruled out infrastructure issues and suspects application logic. Creating custom metrics in Cloud Monitoring allows you to instrument the application with key performance indicators (e.g., request latency, error rates) and correlate them with recent code changes to pinpoint the root cause of intermittent high latency. This approach directly addresses the need to monitor application-level behavior rather than infrastructure metrics.

Answer

Increase the number of nodes in the GKE cluster to handle the load.

Answer

Enable Cloud Logging and analyze logs for error messages during the latency periods.

Answer

Configure GKE usage metering to track resource consumption by namespace.

Question 6

Drag and drop the steps to set up a Cloud VPN tunnel between Google Cloud and an on-premises network into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

1. Create a Cloud Router
2. Create a VPN gateway
3. Create a tunnel with the on-premises public IP and pre-shared key
4. Establish BGP sessions. Cloud Router is used for dynamic routing. The tunnel requires the on-premises public IP and pre-shared key.

Answer

1. Create a VPN gateway
2. Create a Cloud Router
3. Establish BGP sessions
4. Create a tunnel with the on-premises public IP and pre-shared key

Answer

1. Create a VPN gateway
2. Create a tunnel with the on-premises public IP and pre-shared key
3. Establish BGP sessions

Answer

1. Create a tunnel with the on-premises public IP and pre-shared key
2. Create a VPN gateway
3. Create a Cloud Router
4. Establish BGP sessions

Question 7

A company deploys a web application on Compute Engine behind an HTTP Load Balancer. They want to ensure only healthy instances receive traffic. What should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Configure an HTTP health check with a custom request path that returns a 200 status. An HTTP health check with a custom request path that returns a 200 status allows the HTTP Load Balancer to verify that the web application is actually serving requests correctly. This ensures that only instances passing the application-level health check are considered healthy and receive traffic, preventing requests from being routed to instances that may be running but not serving the expected content.

Answer

Configure the instance group autoscaling based on CPU utilization

Answer

Configure a TCP health check on port 80

Answer

Configure an SSL health check to verify TLS handshake

Question 8

A developer wants to monitor a custom application metric from their application running on GKE. What should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring custom metrics API. Cloud Monitoring custom metrics API (option D) is the correct choice because it allows a developer to push custom application-specific metrics (e.g., request latency, queue depth) from a GKE pod using the `custom.googleapis.com` metric domain. This integrates directly with Cloud Monitoring for alerting and dashboards, whereas Cloud Logging is for log data, not metrics.

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Trace

Answer

Cloud Debugger

Question 9

A company runs a stateful application on Compute Engine with persistent disks. They want to ensure data durability across a zone failure. What is the best approach?

Accepted Answer

Use regional persistent disks. Regional persistent disks (RPDs) synchronously replicate data between two zones in the same region, providing an RPO of zero and automatic failover without application-level changes. This ensures data durability across a zone failure while maintaining consistent performance and low latency.

Answer

Replicate data at application level to another instance in a different zone

Answer

Use Google Cloud NetApp Volumes with replication

Answer

Take regular snapshots of the persistent disks and store them in a multiregional bucket

Question 10

A company wants to improve the reliability of their microservices architecture on Google Cloud. Which TWO practices should they implement? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Implement retry with exponential backoff. B is correct because implementing retry with exponential backoff allows transient failures (e.g., network timeouts, temporary service unavailability) to be handled gracefully by automatically retrying the request after increasing delays, reducing load on the recovering service. This pattern is essential in microservices on Google Cloud to improve reliability without overwhelming downstream dependencies.

Answer

Design with a single point of failure for simplicity

Answer

Use synchronous communication between all services

Answer

Disable health checks to reduce latency

Question 11

A team is designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for a critical application. Which THREE components are essential for a robust DR plan? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Failover procedures and runbooks. Failover procedures and runbooks (A) are essential because they provide step-by-step instructions for executing a controlled transition to the secondary site, ensuring minimal downtime and consistent recovery actions. Without documented runbooks, teams risk misconfigurations during a disaster, which can extend recovery time objectives (RTO) beyond acceptable limits.

Answer

A single-region deployment for consistency

Answer

Load testing to validate performance

Question 12

A company wants to monitor the health of their Cloud Run services. Which THREE metrics should they use to define a comprehensive health SLI? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Latency (e.g., p99 response time). Latency (p99 response time) is a critical metric for Cloud Run because it measures the end-to-end request processing time, directly reflecting user experience. In a serverless environment, high latency can indicate cold starts, insufficient concurrency, or downstream service bottlenecks, making it essential for a comprehensive health SLI.

Answer

CPU utilization

Answer

Instance count

Question 13

A company uses Cloud Logging to monitor their application logs. They notice that some logs from their Compute Engine instances are missing. The instances have the required logging permission. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The logging agent is not configured to send logs to Cloud Logging.. Compute Engine instances do not automatically send logs to Cloud Logging. They require the Cloud Logging agent (based on fluentd) to be installed and configured to forward logs. Even with correct IAM permissions, without the agent, logs will not be collected. Option B correctly identifies this missing agent as the most likely cause.

Answer

The log sink is not configured correctly.

Answer

The instances are using a custom image without the logging agent.

Answer

The log bucket is in a different project.

Answer

The log entries are being filtered by the exclusion filter.

Question 14

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.. Object versioning (C) is correct because it keeps prior versions of objects when they are overwritten or deleted, so an accidentally deleted or replaced object can be recovered rather than permanently lost. Bucket retention policy (D) is correct because it enforces a retention period during which objects cannot be deleted or overwritten, directly protecting data against accidental or premature deletion. Together these features address the durability and deletion-protection requirement for user-uploaded content in Cloud Storage. Requester pays (A) only shifts data-access and egress costs to the requester and provides no deletion protection. Lifecycle management (B) automates actions such as deleting or transitioning objects and can actually cause deletion, so it does not protect against accidental loss. Uniform bucket-level access (E) simplifies permission management by applying IAM uniformly at the bucket level, but it does not prevent accidental object deletion.

Answer

Requester pays.

Answer

Lifecycle management.

Answer

Uniform bucket-level access.

Question 15

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.. The error indicates that a health check with the same name already exists. In Google Cloud, health check names must be unique within a project (or within a region for regional health checks). 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.

Answer

Add the --global flag to the command.

Answer

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