Google PCA Manage and provision cloud infrastructure Practice Question
A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application runs on a single VM and uses a local MySQL database. The goal is to minimize changes to the application code while improving availability. Which strategy should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose Option A, mistakenly believing that a managed instance group with a persistent disk provides database high availability, but they overlook that the persistent disk cannot be shared across instances in a managed instance group without additional orchestration (e.g., regional persistent disks or a clustered filesystem), and the database process itself is not automatically failed over.
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
✓
Lift and shift the VM to Compute Engine, and migrate the database to Cloud SQL with a failover replica.
It minimizes code changes by lifting the application VM to Compute Engine as-is, while migrating the local MySQL database to Cloud SQL with a failover replica. This improves availability through Cloud SQL's managed automatic failover to a standby replica in a different zone, without requiring application code changes to the database connection logic (the application can continue using the same MySQL protocol).
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 managed instance group for the application VM and store the database on a persistent disk attached to the primary instance.
Why it's wrong here
The database is still a single point of failure unless you manually configure replication.
- ✗
Re-architect the application into microservices and use Cloud Run for stateless components.
Why it's wrong here
This requires significant code changes and is not minimal effort.
- ✓
Lift and shift the VM to Compute Engine, and migrate the database to Cloud SQL with a failover replica.
Why this is correct
Minimal code changes, uses managed database with high availability.
- ✗
Containerize the application and deploy on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Cloud Spanner as the database.
Why it's wrong here
Requires code changes and Cloud Spanner is not MySQL-compatible.
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
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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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