Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application. They need to ensure that if the primary region fails, the application can fail over to a secondary region with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes. The application uses Cloud Spanner. Which Cloud Spanner configuration meets these requirements?
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
✓
Multi-region configuration (e.g., nam3)
Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations provide automatic replication across regions with synchronous replication, achieving RPO near zero and RTO in seconds. Single-region configurations do not provide geographic failover. A two-region setup like nam3 (US Central + US East) or eur3 (Europe) provides synchronous replication with strong consistency. Active/active is the default. Multi-region configs are recommended for DR.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Multi-region configuration (e.g., nam3)
Why this is correct
Multi-region configurations replicate data synchronously across regions, providing automatic failover with RPO=0 and RTO<15 minutes, meeting the requirements.
- ✗
Single-region configuration
Why it's wrong here
Single-region does not provide failover to another region. An outage in the region would cause downtime.
- ✗
Backup and restore in another region
Why it's wrong here
Backup and restore would have an RPO of hours and RTO of hours, not meeting the 1-hour RPO and 15-minute RTO.
- ✗
Dual-region with asynchronous replication
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Spanner only supports synchronous replication. Asynchronous replication is not a feature.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
RTO
Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable time to restore a system or data after a disaster, defining how quickly normal operations must resume.
Key term
Spanner
Google Cloud's globally distributed, strongly consistent, and horizontally scalable database service designed for mission-critical, transactional workloads.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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