Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question: Google Cloud products, services, and solutions
A company uses Cloud Spanner for a global application. They need to ensure high availability and disaster recovery across regions. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose 2)
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that read replicas or caching services like Memorystore can provide cross-region disaster recovery, but Cloud Spanner's architecture relies on synchronous multi-region replication and backups, not asynchronous replicas or external caches.
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
✓
Schedule regular backups using Cloud Spanner backup feature
Cloud Spanner's built-in backup feature allows you to create consistent backups of your database without impacting performance, and these backups can be restored to a different region for disaster recovery. This provides a reliable way to recover from regional failures or data corruption, ensuring high availability and DR across regions.
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 the database in a single region with backups
Why it's wrong here
Deploying Cloud Spanner in a single region places all replicas within one geographic area, so a regional outage—such as a power failure or network partition—will take the database offline. While scheduled backups protect against data loss and allow restore, they require manual intervention and downtime to restore, typically taking minutes to hours. This configuration lacks automatic failover, so it fails to meet the requirement of keeping a global application available during a regional disruption.
- ✓
Schedule regular backups using Cloud Spanner backup feature
Why this is correct
Scheduling regular backups with the Cloud Spanner backup feature is essential for disaster recovery because it protects against logical corruption, accidental deletion, or application errors that replication cannot mitigate. These backups are consistent and exportable to another instance, enabling point-in-time recovery within the backup's retention window (e.g., up to 35 days). Although backups do not provide immediate failover, they are a fundamental component of a data durability strategy and satisfy the specific ask in this scenario.
- ✗
Configure read replicas in a different region
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Spanner does not support configuring read replicas as separate read-only copies; instead, every replica in a multi-region instance is readable and writable, coordinated through Paxos consensus. Adding replicas in another region is achieved by selecting a multi-region configuration (e.g., nam-eur-asia), which automatically handles synchronous replication and failover. Attempting to set up read replicas is not a valid operation in Spanner, so this option is technically incorrect for achieving regional failover.
- ✗
Use Cloud Memorystore to cache database queries
Why it's wrong here
Using Cloud Memorystore as a caching layer improves read performance by offloading queries, but it does nothing to protect against a regional failure of the primary Spanner instance. A cache stores ephemeral data with no durability guarantees; if Spanner goes down, the cache may serve stale or incomplete data and cannot accept writes or fail over. Disaster recovery requires data redundancy and automatic failover at the database layer, not a cache that simply masks latency.
- ✓
Use a multi-region instance configuration
Why this is correct
A multi-region instance configuration replicates data synchronously across multiple regions using Paxos, providing automatic failover with zero data loss (RPO=0) and minimal recovery time (RTO) during a regional outage. Spanner's managed service seamlessly redirects traffic to a healthy region without manual intervention, making this the correct solution for high availability in a global application. While multi-region configurations increase write latency and cost compared to single-region, they are the standard approach for regional disaster recovery.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
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.