Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
A company runs a global e-commerce site on GKE. They want to ensure disaster recovery with multi-region deployment. What is the best practice for configuring GKE clusters?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that a regional cluster with multiple zones is sufficient for disaster recovery, but the trap here is that a regional cluster is still confined to a single region and cannot survive a full regional outage.
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
✓
Deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions.
For disaster recovery with a multi-region deployment, the best practice is to deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions. This ensures that if an entire region fails, traffic can be redirected to the other region's cluster, providing true geographic redundancy. A single cluster, whether zonal or regional, cannot survive a regional outage because it is bound to a single control plane location.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy separate regional clusters in two or more regions.
Why this is correct
Separate regional clusters place control planes and nodes in distinct regions, so a single region's failure leaves the other serving traffic. This satisfies the multi-region disaster recovery constraint, unlike zonal clusters or single-region node pools.
- ✗
Use a single zonal cluster with node auto-repair.
Why it's wrong here
A zonal cluster confines nodes to one zone, so losing that zone or its region removes all capacity; auto-repair only restarts failed nodes and cannot restore a lost zone. It suits dev/test or workloads tolerating zonal downtime, not disaster recovery spanning regions.
- ✗
Deploy a single cluster with multi-master setup.
Why it's wrong here
GKE control planes are already replicated across zones within a region; a 'multi-master' cluster still lives in one region, so a regional outage halts the workload. It appeals as redundancy, but control-plane replication addresses zone failure, not the multi-region recovery the stem requires.
- ✗
Use a single regional cluster with multiple zones.
Why it's wrong here
A regional cluster spreads nodes across zones within one region, so a region-wide outage takes the whole cluster offline — the stem demands multi-region recovery. It is tempting because regional clusters already survive single-zone failures, which is the right answer when the requirement is zonal, not regional, resilience.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Deployment Manager and Infrastructure as Code
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
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery is a set of policies, procedures, and tools that help an organization restore critical IT systems and data after a disruptive event.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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