Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts 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.

• ✗

  Place all resources in the same zone to simplify management

  Why it's wrong here

  Placing all resources in a single zone may simplify management and reduce inter-zone communication latency, but it creates a single point of failure for the entire application stack. If that zone experiences an outage—due to power, cooling, or network issues—your frontend and database become unavailable simultaneously. Google Cloud's regional services are explicitly designed to survive zone failures, and a single-zone deployment forfeits that built-in availability benefit.

• ✓

  Use a regional managed instance group for the web frontend

  Why this is correct

  A regional managed instance group (MIG) automatically distributes your frontend VM instances across multiple zones within a region, providing zone-level fault tolerance for the stateless web tier. It integrates with regional external load balancing to route traffic away from failed instances and can autoscale based on load. If an entire zone goes down, the MIG continues serving requests from healthy instances in other zones, ensuring high availability without manual intervention.

• ✓

  Use a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance with cross-zone replication

  Why this is correct

  A Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance configured with cross-zone high availability uses a synchronous standby replica in a different zone. This ensures that every transaction is committed to both the primary and standby before acknowledgment, providing zero data loss. If the primary instance or its zone fails, Cloud SQL automatically promotes the standby to primary, typically within a minute, minimizing downtime for the stateful database tier.

• ✗

  Configure the database as a single large instance with automatic backups

  Why it's wrong here

  Automatic backups protect against data loss from accidental deletions or corruption, but they do not provide high availability. A single large database instance is a single point of failure; if it crashes or its zone fails, you cannot fail over automatically. Recovery requires restoring from a backup, which results in significant downtime and potential data loss up to the last backup or point-in-time recovery window, making it unsuitable for a production multi-tier application.

• ✗

  Deploy the web frontend in a single zone to reduce network latency

  Why it's wrong here

  Deploying the web frontend in a single zone might slightly reduce network latency because requests do not traverse a zone boundary, but this gain is minimal—intra-region latency is typically single-digit milliseconds. However, doing so introduces a single point of failure: if that zone experiences an outage, the entire frontend becomes unreachable, even if the database and other tiers remain healthy. The availability risk and potential revenue loss far outweigh any negligible performance benefit.

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