Google ACE Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Compute Engine persistent disk attached to a VM in a managed instance group

  Why it's wrong here

  A Compute Engine persistent disk is a zonal block storage resource, meaning it is physically attached to a single zone and cannot be accessed from another zone if that zone fails. While a managed instance group (MIG) can automatically restart a VM, it cannot attach the same persistent disk to a new VM in a different zone, and it does not provide database-level failover, replication, or transaction management. Thus, this setup offers no real high availability for a relational database and is suited only for stateless or locally-redundant workloads.

• ✗

  Cloud Storage with object versioning

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Storage is an object storage service designed for unstructured data like media files, backups, or static assets, not for relational database workloads. Object versioning lets you recover from accidental deletions or overwrites, but it does not provide SQL querying, transactional integrity, or the ability to run a legacy monolith's business logic. The service lacks ACID guarantees and relational semantics, making it fundamentally unsuited to replace a database that the application depends on.

• ✓

  Cloud SQL with a regional (HA) configuration

  Why this is correct

  Cloud SQL with a regional (HA) configuration is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed relational database with automatic failover to a standby instance in a different zone within the same region. Data is synchronously replicated to the standby, so if the primary zone experiences an outage, Google Cloud promotes the standby with minimal disruption and no manual intervention. This gives the legacy monolithic application the ACID transactions, relational queries, and high availability it needs, at a cost and complexity level appropriate for moderate workloads.

• ✗

  Cloud Spanner

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database that offers strong consistency across regions, but it is overkill for a moderate, single-region legacy monolith. Its multi-region replication, distributed transaction coordination, and high node costs make it more expensive and operationally complex than necessary. Choosing Spanner would introduce needless infrastructure overhead and cost, whereas Cloud SQL already provides sufficient high availability for a workload that is not globally distributed.

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