Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Test 7 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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?

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

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.

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

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Use a global Cloud Load Balancer and enable Cloud CDN.

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

Question 2

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'.. 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.

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Query the Compute Engine API periodically and check CPU usage.

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

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

Question 3

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.. 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.

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

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Enable Cloud CDN to cache content closer to users.

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

Question 4

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.. 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.

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

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

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

Question 5

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.

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

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Proceed with the release because the remaining budget is sufficient.

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

Question 6

Your company runs a critical multi-tier application: a global HTTP(S) load balancer, multiple regional managed instance groups (MIGs) for the web tier, and Cloud Spanner for the data tier. You need to design for zone-level and region-level failures. What architecture ensures the highest availability?

Accepted Answer

Use a global HTTP(S) load balancer with regional MIGs in multiple regions, each spanning zones, and a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance.. It combines a global HTTP(S) load balancer (which can route traffic to healthy backends across regions), regional MIGs that span multiple zones within each region (providing zone-level redundancy), and a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance (which provides synchronous replication across regions for strong consistency and automatic failover). This architecture ensures that if an entire zone or region fails, traffic is automatically redirected to healthy backends in other zones/regions, and Spanner continues to serve reads and writes without manual intervention.

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Use a global HTTP(S) load balancer with a single global MIG and a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance.

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Use a global HTTP(S) load balancer with a single zonal MIG and Cloud Spanner single-region.

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Use a regional HTTP(S) load balancer with a regional MIG and Cloud SQL with cross-region replication.

Question 7

You are responsible for incident management for a production service. You want to reduce manual toil during the initial response to common issues like high latency. What is the best approach?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Monitoring to trigger a Cloud Function that performs automated checks and rolls back the last deployment if latency spikes.. It directly reduces manual toil by automating the initial response to common issues like high latency. Cloud Monitoring triggers a Cloud Function that performs automated checks and, if latency spikes, rolls back the last deployment, eliminating the need for human intervention during the critical first response phase.

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Set up Cloud Monitoring alerts with email notifications to the on-call engineer.

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Create detailed runbooks and require the on-call to follow them step by step.

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Enable Cloud Logging and set up a custom dashboard for the on-call.

Question 8

Your organization is implementing a Disaster Recovery plan for a critical database. Which THREE components are essential for a robust DR strategy? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Automated failover process to switch traffic to the DR region.. An automated failover process is essential for minimizing Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in a Disaster Recovery strategy. Without automation, manual intervention introduces delays and risks of human error, which can extend downtime significantly. In cloud or on-premises environments, automated failover typically relies on health checks, DNS updates, or traffic manager rules to seamlessly redirect traffic to the DR region when the primary fails.

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A single global load balancer for both regions.

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Using a single zone for the primary region.

Question 9

Your service has a 99.99% uptime SLO (monthly error budget ~ 4 minutes). Which TWO monitoring practices best support this SLO? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Use a combination of availability (e.g., HTTP 200 rate) and latency (e.g., p99) as SLIs.. Option B is correct because a 99.99% uptime SLO is best measured with SLIs that reflect user-perceived health, so combining an availability SLI (the proportion of successful HTTP 200 responses) with a latency SLI (such as p99 request duration) captures both whether requests succeed and whether they are served acceptably fast. Option E is correct because with a monthly error budget of roughly 4 minutes, tracking error budget consumption and alerting on a burn rate threshold (for example, a fast-burn alert at 14.4x over 1 hour or a slow-burn alert at 6x over 6 hours) detects when the budget is being exhausted too quickly and enables timely action. Option A is not correct because CPU utilization is a resource metric, not a direct SLI for an uptime SLO, and an 80% average threshold does not reliably indicate user-visible failures. Option C is not correct because relying only on synthetic monitoring from multiple locations omits real user traffic and can miss failures that affect actual customers. Option D is not correct because alerting on every 5xx error immediately is too noisy and does not account for error budget policy or burn rate.

Answer

Monitor CPU utilization and alert when average exceeds 80%.

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Use only synthetic monitoring from multiple locations.

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Alert on every 5xx error immediately.

Question 10

The exhibit shows the output of a 'gcloud compute instances describe' command for an instance. What is the most likely impact on reliability if the host machine needs maintenance?

Accepted Answer

The instance will be terminated and then restarted, causing a brief downtime.. When a host machine requires maintenance, Google Compute Engine instances that are not configured for live migration will be terminated and then restarted on another host. This behavior is determined by the 'onHostMaintenance' setting; if it is set to 'TERMINATE' (the default for instances with GPUs or preemptible VMs), the instance stops and restarts, causing brief downtime. The exhibit likely shows 'onHostMaintenance: TERMINATE' or the instance lacks live migration support, making termination and restart the expected outcome.

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The instance will not be affected because automatic restart is enabled.

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The instance will be backed up automatically before maintenance.

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The instance will be live migrated to another host without interruption.

Question 11

The exhibit shows a Cloud Storage bucket configuration. What does this configuration ensure?

Accepted Answer

Objects can only be permanently deleted after the retention period expires.. The exhibit shows a bucket configured with a retention policy. When a retention policy is set on a Cloud Storage bucket, objects cannot be deleted or overwritten until the retention period expires. This ensures that objects can only be permanently deleted after the retention period ends, which is exactly what option C describes.

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Older versions of objects are automatically transferred to a different storage class.

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Data is replicated to another region for disaster recovery.

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Objects older than 30 days will be automatically deleted.

Question 12

The exhibit shows a managed instance group configuration. What is the primary purpose of the 'autoHealingPolicies' section?

Accepted Answer

Automatically replace instances that are deemed unhealthy based on the health check.. The 'autoHealingPolicies' section in a managed instance group configuration is specifically designed to automatically replace instances that are deemed unhealthy based on a configured health check. When a health check probe (e.g., HTTP, TCP, or SSL) fails for a sustained period, the managed instance group terminates the unhealthy instance and creates a new one from the instance template, ensuring the desired number of healthy instances is maintained. This is distinct from autoscaling, which adjusts instance count based on load metrics.

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Distribute incoming traffic evenly across the instances.

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Automatically add more instances when CPU utilization exceeds 60%.

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Automatically update instances to a new instance template.

Question 13

A company runs a global e-commerce site on GKE. They want to ensure disaster recovery with multi-region deployment. What is the best practice for configuring GKE clusters?

Accepted Answer

Deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions.. For disaster recovery with a multi-region deployment, the best practice is to deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions. This ensures that if an entire region fails, traffic can be redirected to the other region's cluster, providing true geographic redundancy. A single cluster, whether zonal or regional, cannot survive a regional outage because it is bound to a single control plane location.

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Use a single zonal cluster with node auto-repair.

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Deploy a single cluster with multi-master setup.

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Use a single regional cluster with multiple zones.

Question 14

A company uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. They want to minimize downtime during maintenance. Which feature should they enable?

Accepted Answer

High availability with a standby in another zone.. High availability (HA) with a standby in another zone ensures that Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL automatically fails over to a standby instance in a different zone if the primary zone experiences an outage. This minimizes downtime during maintenance because Cloud SQL performs a controlled failover to the standby, typically completing within a few seconds, rather than requiring a full instance restart or rebuild.

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Read replicas.

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Point-in-time recovery.

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Automated backups.

Question 15

A company wants to monitor their Cloud Run services for errors and latency. Which Google Cloud product should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring. Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver Monitoring) provides comprehensive observability for Cloud Run services, including built-in dashboards for request latency, error rates, and resource utilization. It collects metrics like request count, request latencies, and container instance counts, and allows you to set alerting policies based on these metrics. While Cloud Trace can help with latency analysis and Cloud Logging captures logs, Cloud Monitoring is the primary product for monitoring both errors and latency in a unified view.

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Cloud Trace

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Cloud Logging

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Error Reporting