Google PCA Practice Question: Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
A company has a multi-region deployment of App Engine and wants to optimize request routing for latency and cost. Which GCP service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Cloud DNS latency-based routing (a DNS-level, cache-prone approach) with true anycast-based global load balancing, which provides immediate, health-aware routing without DNS caching delays.
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
✓
Cloud Load Balancing with global anycast.
Cloud Load Balancing with global anycast uses Google's global network and anycast IP addresses to route user traffic to the nearest healthy backend, minimizing latency. It also supports premium tier routing for lower latency and standard tier for lower cost, directly addressing the optimization goals for a multi-region App Engine deployment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Cloud Endpoints.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Endpoints provides API management, authentication and monitoring for APIs; it does not perform global latency- or cost-based request routing across App Engine regions. It is tempting for API-centric architectures, but the requirement is traffic distribution, which Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancing handles.
- ✓
Cloud Load Balancing with global anycast.
Why this is correct
Cloud Load Balancing with global anycast advertises a single global IP, routing each user to the nearest healthy App Engine region at Google's edge. This minimises latency and avoids cross-region egress costs compared with regional or DNS-based routing.
- ✗
Cloud DNS with latency-based routing.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud DNS latency-based routing steers DNS resolution, not HTTP request routing, and cannot apply App Engine dispatch or cost-based rules. It is tempting because latency routing sounds equivalent, but DNS answers are cached and coarse, unlike the load balancer's per-request regional steering.
- ✗
Cloud Traffic Director.
Why it's wrong here
Traffic Director targets proxied VM and container workloads, particularly service-mesh deployments, rather than App Engine's managed routing. It is tempting because it does global load balancing, but App Engine regional routing is configured through load balancing and dispatch rules, not Traffic Director.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
IP Addressing, Cloud DNS, and Cloud NAT
Key term
App Engine
App Engine is a fully managed serverless platform from Google Cloud that lets developers build and deploy applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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