Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A retail company wants to reduce latency for customers in Europe and Asia by hosting their application closer to users. They also need high availability in case of a regional outage. Which TWO actions should they take?
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 the application in multiple regions
Deploying in multiple regions reduces latency for users in different geographies and provides disaster recovery. Replicating data across zones within a single region does not protect against regional failures.
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 application in multiple regions
Why this is correct
Running the application in multiple GCP regions, such as europe-west1 and europe-west4, places compute capacity near EU users, cutting round-trip time. It also enables active-active or active-passive failover, so if one region fails traffic can be served from another, improving availability.
- ✗
Use a single region with multiple zones
Why it's wrong here
A single regional deployment with multiple zones only protects against zonal failures, not regional outages. For EU latency, the region may still be distant from some users, and if the entire region experiences an outage the application becomes unavailable. This option does not address cross-region latency or regional disaster recovery.
- ✗
Enable Cloud CDN on the application
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN caches static content at Google's edge PoPs, reducing latency for repeated static asset requests, but it does not affect dynamic application compute or provide failover. If the backend region fails, the CDN may serve stale cached content but cannot serve new dynamic requests. It is complementary to, not a substitute for, regional deployment or a global load balancer.
- ✓
Configure a global load balancer
Why this is correct
A global load balancer (e.g., Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancing) uses anycast to route each user to the closest healthy backend region, thus reducing latency and automatically redirecting traffic away from unhealthy instances. It also enables traffic management like a single global anycast IP and health checking. However, it requires backend instances in multiple regions; the load balancer itself does not host compute, so it complements a multi-region deployment.
- ✗
Increase machine size in a single zone
Why it's wrong here
Increasing machine size in a single zone only scales vertical capacity, which does not reduce network latency for geographically distributed users or improve availability. It leaves the application vulnerable to zonal and regional failures and does not move compute closer to EU users. This is a capacity optimization, not a latency or resilience solution.
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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.