Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question: Google Cloud products, services, and solutions
A company is running a latency-sensitive application on Compute Engine instances in a single zone. They want to improve availability without sacrificing low latency. Which strategy should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse high availability with geographic distribution, assuming multiple regions are always better, but the question explicitly requires low latency, which multi-region deployments cannot guarantee due to increased network distance.
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
✓
Deploy instances in multiple zones within the same region
Deploying instances in multiple zones within the same region provides high availability by distributing workloads across physically separate data centers (zones) while keeping network latency low, as intra-region latency is typically under 1-2 ms. This approach protects against zonal failures without the added latency of cross-region communication, which can be 10-100 ms or more.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy instances in multiple zones within the same region
Why this is correct
Deploying instances across multiple zones within the same region keeps compute close to users and each other, with one-way network latency typically under 1-2 ms, while protecting against entire data center failures. A regional managed instance group can distribute instances across zones and use health checks to automatically replace failed VMs, ensuring the application remains available during a zone outage without forcing cross-geography traffic.
- ✗
Use Cloud CDN to cache content
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN caches static and some dynamic content at edge points of presence, reducing latency for users far from the origin, but it does nothing to keep your compute tier running if the underlying zone fails. Requests that are not cacheable (e.g., authenticated API calls) still hit the origin, and the CDN cannot fail over a zonal outage or maintain stateful connections. Thus it addresses content delivery speed, not infrastructure availability.
- ✗
Use larger machine types with more vCPUs
Why it's wrong here
Moving to larger machine types with more vCPUs increases the per-instance compute capacity, which may improve throughput under load, but it leaves the application as a single point of failure. A single VM, regardless of size, resides in a specific zone and will go down if that zone experiences an outage, so vertical scaling cannot satisfy the requirement for application availability. Availability requires redundancy across failure domains, not just more resources inside one instance.
- ✗
Deploy instances in multiple regions
Why it's wrong here
Deploying instances in multiple regions introduces inter-region network latency that can easily be 50-100 milliseconds or more, directly conflicting with the latency-sensitive requirement. While this approach provides strong disaster recovery, it does so at the cost of user-facing responsiveness unless paired with active-active global load balancing and data locality, which is complex and still slower than same-region traffic. For a typical stateful or tightly coupled application, the latency penalty makes multi-region the wrong primary strategy.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Compute Options on Google Cloud
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
Region
A region is a distinct geographic location where a cloud provider operates multiple data centers that are connected by low-latency networks and provide cloud services.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL 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 GCDL exam.