Google PCA Manage and provision cloud infrastructure Practice Question
A company is deploying a new application on Compute Engine. They need to ensure that the application can automatically recover from a zone failure. What is the best approach?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between live migration (which handles host maintenance but not zone failures) and multi-zone MIGs (which handle zone failures), leading candidates to mistakenly choose live migration as a recovery mechanism.
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
✓
Create a managed instance group with instances in multiple zones.
A managed instance group (MIG) with instances in multiple zones provides automatic recovery from a zone failure by distributing instances across zones and using auto-healing to recreate failed instances. If one zone becomes unavailable, the load balancer routes traffic to healthy instances in other zones, ensuring high availability without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create a managed instance group with instances in multiple zones.
Why this is correct
MIG auto-heals and distributes across zones.
- ✗
Use a global load balancer in front of a single instance.
Why it's wrong here
Global load balancing does not handle zone failure recovery.
- ✗
Create a single VM in a single zone and rely on live migration.
Why it's wrong here
Live migration handles maintenance, not zone failure.
- ✗
Use Cloud Storage to store application state and restore from a snapshot.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots are for data recovery, not instance recovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Cloud Compute Options Overview
Key term
Load balancer
A load balancer is a device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers so no single server gets overwhelmed.
Key term
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
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