Google ACE Setting Up a Cloud Solution Environment Practice Question

An engineer needs to choose a location for a new GCP project's resources to maximize availability and minimize latency for users in Europe and Asia. Which three actions should they take? (Choose THREE)

⚠ Common exam trap

The trap is choosing a single region or single zone for 'simplicity' — the exam rewards multi-region design for global user bases, and single-zone answers are almost always wrong when availability is a stated goal.

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

✓

Use a global load balancer to distribute traffic

Option A is correct because a global external Application Load Balancer (or global external proxy Network Load Balancer) uses Google's global anycast edge network to route users to the closest healthy backend, reducing latency and improving availability across Europe and Asia. Option C is correct because deploying resources in multiple regions such as europe-west1 and asia-east1 places compute and data physically near European and Asian users, and multi-region deployment protects against regional failures. Option E is correct because Cloud CDN caches content at Google edge points of presence (over 100+ locations), serving cached responses from the nearest edge to further cut latency for static and cacheable content. Option B is not appropriate because setting the default region to us-central1 would place resources in North America, far from the target European and Asian users, increasing latency. Option D is not appropriate because a single zone in europe-west1 creates a single point of failure and does not serve Asian users with low latency, contradicting the availability and latency goals.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

✓
Use a global load balancer to distribute traffic
Why this is correct
Global external HTTPS load balancing leverages a single anycast IP address and Google's global backbone to forward each user request to the optimal backend based on latency and health. It performs traffic distribution at L7 to the nearest available region, allowing active/active serving across multiple regions without DNS round-robin. This is the standard control plane that unifies multi-region deployments into one global endpoint.
✗
Set the project default region to us-central1
Why it's wrong here
Setting a project default region to us-central1 only defines where resources will be created by default; it has no effect on request routing or user distance. While us-central1 is a dense, low-cost region, it is geographically far from both European and Asian users, adding 70–120 ms RTT to each side. For a globally distributed audience, choosing a single US region without any load balancer or CDN guarantees suboptimal performance for at least one major continent.
✓
Deploy resources in europe-west1 and asia-east1
Why this is correct
Deploying resources in europe-west1 and asia-east1 deliberately places compute and data near two large user bases, cutting network path length and reducing latency. This geographic redundancy also provides active/failover capability, so backend capacity remains available if one region experiences an outage. To serve all users efficiently, these regional deployments should be fronted by a global load balancer and synchronized at the data layer.
✗
Use a single zone in europe-west1 for simplicity
Why it's wrong here
Using a single zone in europe-west1 is a single point of failure: a zone outage takes down every workload with no failover target. Geographically it only covers western Europe; Asian users will cross continents and suffer high latency. A single-zone architecture cannot meet global performance or availability goals, so it is unacceptable for a multi-region service.
✓
Enable Cloud CDN to cache content at edge locations
Why this is correct
Cloud CDN sits in front of your global load balancer and serves content from Google's distributed edge cache locations, which are closer to users than the origin for most requests. It offloads repeated static requests, dramatically reduces origin latency, and absorbs traffic spikes. CDN complements but does not replace multi-region compute for dynamic content, so it must be used alongside regional backends and global load balancing.

Go deeper

Google ACE Setting Up a Cloud Solution Environment Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

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