Google PCA Timed Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company uses Shared VPC. A project admin in a service project tries to create a subnet in the shared VPC network but receives a permission denied error. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The service project admin lacks the compute.subnetworks.create permission on the host project.. In a Shared VPC architecture, subnet creation is a privileged operation that can only be performed by a user with the compute.subnetworks.create permission on the host project. The service project admin, by default, does not have this permission in the host project, which is why the permission denied error occurs. Granting this permission to the service project admin at the host project level would resolve the issue.

Answer

Only the Shared VPC host project admin can create subnets.

Answer

The Shared VPC is not enabled for the service project.

Answer

Subnets must be created in the service project, not the host project.

Question 2

Your organization stores critical financial data in Cloud Storage. You need to ensure that if an object is deleted or overwritten, you can recover it within 30 days. What feature should you enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable object versioning on the bucket. Cloud Storage offers object versioning and retention policies to protect data. Versioning keeps non-current versions of objects, allowing recovery from accidental deletion or overwrites. Object retention policies (e.g., retention policy or hold) prevent deletion or modification for a specified period, but versioning is the primary mechanism to recover from deletion.

Answer

Set a retention policy with a 30-day retention period

Answer

Configure lifecycle management to delete objects after 30 days

Answer

Enable Bucket Lock with a retention policy

Question 3

A financial services company uses Cloud Storage to store sensitive transaction records. They need to ensure that objects cannot be deleted or overwritten for a retention period of 7 years, even by the bucket owner. Which feature should they enable?

Question 4

A company needs to store and serve large media files (each up to 5 GB) to users globally. The files are accessed infrequently (once a quarter) but must be available with low latency. Which THREE Cloud Storage classes and features should they consider? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Nearline is suitable for data accessed less than once a month. Cloud CDN caches content at edge locations for low latency. Object lifecycle management can transition objects to colder storage automatically. Standard is for frequently accessed data. Coldline is for data accessed less than once a quarter. Archive is for data accessed less than once a year.

Answer

Coldline storage class

Answer

Standard storage class

Question 5

A company has a GKE cluster with Workload Identity enabled. A pod needs to access a BigQuery dataset in a different project. The team has created a service account in the pod's project and granted it BigQuery Data Viewer on the dataset. They also created an IAM policy binding between the Kubernetes service account and the Google service account. The pod still gets permission denied. What is missing?

Accepted Answer

The Google service account needs the iam.workloadIdentityUser role on itself. Workload Identity requires the Google service account to be granted the iam.workloadIdentityUser role on the Google service account itself, not just on the Kubernetes service account.

Answer

The Kubernetes service account needs the iam.workloadIdentityUser role

Answer

The pod needs a node pool with Workload Identity enabled

Answer

The BigQuery dataset must be in the same project as the cluster

Question 6

A company deploys a global application on Cloud Run and uses Cloud SQL for user data. They need sub-10ms read latency for frequently accessed user profiles across regions. Traffic is unpredictable but consistently high. The database must support strong consistency. Which approach meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Spanner with multi-region configuration. Cloud Spanner with a multi-region configuration is the only option that provides strong consistency, sub-10ms read latency, and automatic scaling for unpredictable, high traffic across regions. It uses synchronous replication with Paxos-based consensus to ensure globally consistent reads without sacrificing performance.

Answer

Use Cloud Bigtable with replication across regions

Answer

Use Cloud SQL with read replicas in each region and enable synchronous replication

Answer

Use Cloud SQL with cross-region replication and Memorystore cache in each region

Question 7

Refer to the exhibit. The SLO for the payments-api service is 99.9% availability over 30 days. The current compliance is 99.89% and the error budget is exhausted. Which action should the SRE team take FIRST?

Accepted Answer

Pause all non-critical deployments and investigate the cause of the increased error rate.. The error budget is exhausted, meaning the service has already consumed its allowed downtime for the 30-day window. The immediate priority is to stop further budget erosion by pausing non-critical deployments and investigating the root cause of the increased error rate. This aligns with SRE best practices: when the error budget is depleted, the team should shift focus from feature velocity to reliability, halting all non-essential changes until the cause is understood and mitigated.

Answer

Increase the SLO target to 99.99% to reduce future burn rate.

Answer

Trigger a rollback of the latest deployment to stabilize the service.

Answer

Scale up the service to handle more traffic and reduce error rate.

Question 8

Your company runs a production application on Compute Engine instances behind a managed instance group (MIG). You need to perform a rolling update with canary testing, gradually shifting traffic to the new version only if performance metrics are healthy. Which approach should you use?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Deploy with a deployment strategy that includes a canary phase and automated verification. Cloud Deploy can be used to orchestrate canary deployments on Compute Engine. However, a more direct approach is to use a MIG with a canary configuration: you can update the MIG's instance template and use a new MIG for the canary version, then adjust the load balancer's backend weights to shift traffic gradually. Cloud Deploy supports this with deployment strategies.

Answer

Create a new MIG with the new template and use a Cloud Load Balancer's traffic splitting

Answer

Manually update each instance by SSH'ing and running a script

Answer

Use gcloud compute instance-groups managed rolling-action start-update with a maxSurge of 0

Question 9

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.

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 10

Match each GCP monitoring/logging tool to its purpose.

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring: Provides visibility into performance, uptime, and health of applications and infrastructure.. Correct matches: Cloud Monitoring monitors performance, Cloud Logging manages logs, Error Reporting tracks errors. Confusion often arises between logging and monitoring roles.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring: Real-time log management and analysis for applications and services.

Answer

Cloud Logging: Counts, analyzes, and aggregates errors in cloud services.