Google PCA Design and plan a cloud solution architecture Practice Question
A financial services company is designing a multi-region application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for high availability. They need to serve user requests from the closest region and automatically failover if a region becomes unavailable. Which architecture should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse zonal high availability (auto-scaling across zones within one region) with regional high availability (multi-region failover), and overlook that a global load balancer with multiple regional backends is required for true multi-region traffic steering and failover.
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 GKE clusters in multiple regions and use a multicluster ingress with an external HTTP(S) load balancer set up with the global external backend.
Deploying GKE clusters in multiple regions and using a multicluster ingress with a global external HTTP(S) load balancer enables traffic routing to the closest healthy backend cluster based on latency or geography, and automatically fails over to another region if one becomes unavailable. The global external backend configuration allows the load balancer to distribute traffic across multiple regional GKE clusters, providing both proximity-based routing and high availability.
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 global external HTTP(S) load balancer with a single backend service pointing to one regional cluster.
Why it's wrong here
A single backend service does not provide multi-region failover; traffic is sent to one region.
- ✗
Use Cloud CDN in front of a single regional GKE cluster to cache content.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN does not provide load balancing failover across regions.
- ✗
Use a single regional GKE cluster with auto-scaling across zones.
Why it's wrong here
A single regional cluster provides zone-level HA but cannot survive a regional failure.
- ✓
Deploy GKE clusters in multiple regions and use a multicluster ingress with an external HTTP(S) load balancer set up with the global external backend.
Why this is correct
This architecture uses the Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer with multicluster ingress to direct traffic to the nearest healthy cluster, providing geographic load balancing and failover.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
HTTP(S) Load Balancer
A network device or software that distributes incoming web traffic across multiple servers using HTTP or HTTPS protocols to ensure high availability, reliability, and performance.
Key term
Latency
Latency is the time delay between a request being sent over a network and the response being received, often measured in milliseconds.
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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.