Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
A company uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. They want to minimize downtime during maintenance. Which feature should they enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse read replicas with high availability, assuming read replicas can automatically take over for the primary, but read replicas require manual promotion and do not provide automatic failover, making HA with a standby the correct choice for minimizing downtime during maintenance.
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
✓
High availability with a standby in another zone.
High availability (HA) with a standby in another zone ensures that Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL automatically fails over to a standby instance in a different zone if the primary zone experiences an outage. This minimizes downtime during maintenance because Cloud SQL performs a controlled failover to the standby, typically completing within a few seconds, rather than requiring a full instance restart or rebuild.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Read replicas.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas serve read traffic and provide failover, but maintenance on the primary still interrupts writes; they do not eliminate the maintenance window itself. They are tempting because they improve availability, but would be correct for scaling read-heavy workloads or offloading analytics queries.
- ✓
High availability with a standby in another zone.
Why this is correct
High availability provisions a standby replica in a different zone; during maintenance or a zone failure, Cloud SQL fails over automatically, minimising downtime. Read replicas and automated backups do not provide this automatic cross-zone failover, so they cannot satisfy the stem's downtime constraint.
- ✗
Point-in-time recovery.
Why it's wrong here
Point-in-time recovery restores a database to a past moment using transaction logs; it does nothing to reduce the maintenance window, since the instance still restarts. It is tempting because it protects against data loss, but would be correct for recovering from an erroneous write or corruption.
- ✗
Automated backups.
Why it's wrong here
Automated backups capture data for restoration after loss or corruption; they do not shift maintenance onto another instance, so downtime during patching remains. They are tempting because they protect availability, but would be correct for recovering from accidental deletion or corruption, not scheduled maintenance.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Key term
High availability
High availability is a system design approach that aims to keep applications and services operational and accessible with minimal downtime, even when some components fail.
Key term
Cloud SQL
Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that lets you set up, maintain, and scale SQL databases (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server) in the cloud without managing the underlying infrastructure.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCA practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PCA exam.