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
A managed instance group spanning multiple zones maintains capacity when one zone fails, satisfying the automatic zone-failure recovery requirement. The group's regional distribution and autohealing replace unhealthy instances in surviving zones, unlike a single-zone group or manual restart, which cannot survive zone loss.
- ✗
Use a global load balancer in front of a single instance.
Why it's wrong here
A global load balancer distributes traffic across backends, but a single instance in one zone remains a single point of failure; the balancer has no healthy backend to route to during a zone outage. It is tempting because global load balancing is the correct mechanism for spreading traffic across multiple healthy instances in several zones.
- ✗
Create a single VM in a single zone and rely on live migration.
Why it's wrong here
Live migration relocates a running VM between hosts within the same zone during maintenance; it cannot move an instance across zone boundaries, so a zone outage halts the application. It is tempting because it provides host-level resilience, which is the correct mechanism for planned infrastructure maintenance, not zone failure.
- ✗
Use Cloud Storage to store application state and restore from a snapshot.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Storage snapshots preserve data, not compute; restoring state still requires manually provisioning and starting a VM in another zone, so recovery is not automatic. It is tempting because durable state storage is the right mechanism for backup and disaster recovery of data, but it does not deliver automatic compute failover.
Go deeper
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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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