Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
A company deploys a critical application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and wants to ensure high availability during cluster upgrades. Which TWO practices should they follow?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse control plane high availability (regional clusters) with application-level high availability, or they assume autoscaling can compensate for disruption during upgrades, when in fact PDBs and multi-zone node pools are the correct mechanisms.
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
✓
Use multiple node pools across different zones within the cluster.
Deploying multiple node pools across different zones ensures that if one zone fails or is taken down for maintenance, the application can continue serving from the other zones. This aligns with GKE's best practice for high availability by distributing workloads across failure domains. Option C is correct because PodDisruptionBudgets (PDBs) define the minimum number of pods that must remain available during voluntary disruptions like cluster upgrades, preventing the upgrade from taking down too many replicas at once.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use a single-zone node pool with multiple replicas.
Why it's wrong here
Single-zone node pools are vulnerable to zone failures and may become unavailable during upgrades in that zone.
- ✓
Use multiple node pools across different zones within the cluster.
Why this is correct
Multi-zone node pools allow pods to be rescheduled in other zones during upgrades.
- ✓
Configure PodDisruptionBudgets to allow only a small number of pods to be unavailable during upgrades.
Why this is correct
PDBs ensure that voluntary disruptions do not bring down too many pods at once.
- ✗
Enable cluster autoscaling to add nodes during upgrades.
Why it's wrong here
Autoscaling adds nodes based on resource demand, not to maintain availability during upgrades.
- ✗
Enable regional clusters for multi-zone control plane.
Why it's wrong here
Regional clusters provide high availability for the control plane, but node pools must also be multi-zone for workload availability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
CAN
A CAN (Controller Area Network) is a robust vehicle bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other without a host computer.
Key term
Anthos
Anthos is a Google Cloud platform that lets you run applications consistently across different computing environments, like on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds.
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