Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
An e-commerce company is experiencing traffic spikes during flash sales. They need their application to automatically scale up and down based on CPU utilization, without manual intervention. Their application runs on a managed platform. Which feature should they enable?
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
✓
Enable autoscaling
Autoscaling is the correct feature to automatically adjust the number of instances based on metrics like CPU utilization. Load balancing distributes traffic, snapshots are for backups, and VPC peering connects networks.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Schedule regular snapshots
Why it's wrong here
Scheduled snapshots create point-in-time backups of persistent disks for disaster recovery and data protection. They do not influence live compute capacity, nor do they adapt to traffic load, so taking snapshots during a spike does nothing to absorb increased request volume. In fact, snapshotting during peak periods can add I/O overhead without any autoscaling benefit.
- ✗
Set up VPC peering
Why it's wrong here
VPC peering establishes private IP connectivity between two Virtual Private Cloud networks, enabling internal traffic routing without going over the public internet. It neither monitors utilization nor provisions additional VM instances, so it cannot react to or mitigate traffic spikes. While peering is useful for multi-VPC architectures, it is orthogonal to workload scaling.
- ✗
Configure a load balancer
Why it's wrong here
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across existing instances but does not monitor CPU utilisation or trigger instance creation or termination. It is tempting because load balancers are essential for handling traffic spikes by spreading requests, and in a scenario where the application already scales manually or via another mechanism, a load balancer would be the correct choice to ensure even distribution.
- ✓
Enable autoscaling
Why this is correct
Autoscaling automatically adjusts the number of VM instances in a managed instance group based on demand metrics such as CPU utilization, requests per second, or queue depth. When traffic spikes, autoscaling proactively or reactively provisions additional instances to maintain performance, then scales down during lulls to control cost. This makes it the correct mechanism for handling unpredictable e-commerce traffic spikes.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managed Services vs Unmanaged Services on GCP
Key term
VPC
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a logically isolated section of a cloud provider's network where you can launch and manage resources like servers and databases with complete control over IP addressing, subnets, route tables, and security.
Key term
VPC peering
VPC peering is a direct network connection between two virtual private clouds that allows them to communicate using private IP addresses as if they were part of the same network.
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JA
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.