Google ACE Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution Practice Question
A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application requires persistent storage and must be highly available with automatic failover across zones. The workload has a moderate number of reads and writes. Which storage solution meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is over-engineering the answer — candidates see 'highly available' and jump to Spanner, but Spanner is for massive global scale, while Cloud SQL regional HA is the right fit for moderate workloads needing zonal failover.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Cloud SQL with a regional (HA) configuration
Cloud SQL with a regional (HA) configuration provides a managed relational database with a primary instance in one zone and a standby in another, with automatic failover if the primary fails. It offers persistent storage, cross-zone high availability, and is well-suited to moderate read/write workloads typical of a migrated monolithic application. This matches the requirement for automatic failover across zones without the operational overhead of self-managed options.
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.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Storage Lifecycle Rules
Key term
High availability
High availability is a system design approach that aims to keep applications and services operational and accessible with minimal downtime, even when some components fail.
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
This ACE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ACE exam.