Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
A financial services company runs a latency-sensitive trading application on GKE. The platform team must guarantee that the application can be recovered within a 15-minute recovery time objective (RTO) and a 5-minute recovery point objective (RPO) after a regional failure. They use a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket for configuration and a regional GKE cluster. Which additional design element is required to meet both objectives?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is treating multi-zone node pools within a single region as sufficient for a regional failure, when they only protect against zone-level outages.
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 a second regional GKE cluster in another region and use a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket for shared configuration, with a documented failover runbook.
Meeting a 15-minute RTO and 5-minute RPO after a regional failure requires compute capacity and configuration data available outside the failed region. A standby GKE cluster in another region supplies the compute, while a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket keeps configuration accessible. A rehearsed failover runbook ensures the team can switch over quickly enough to satisfy the RTO.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable GKE cluster autoscaling and configure a horizontal pod autoscaler for the trading pods.
Why it's wrong here
Autoscaling adjusts capacity based on demand; it does not address recovery of the cluster or data after a regional failure. The RTO and RPO relate to restoring service and data, not to handling load. Autoscaling alone leaves the application dependent on the failed region's control plane and nodes, so it cannot meet the recovery objectives.
- ✗
Configure the existing regional GKE cluster with a node pool in each of the three zones of its region and enable pod anti-affinity.
Why it's wrong here
Spreading nodes and pods across zones within one region protects against a single zone failure, not a regional failure. If the entire region becomes unavailable, the cluster and its workloads are also unavailable. This design improves zone-level resilience but does not provide the cross-region capacity needed to meet the stated RTO and RPO.
- ✗
Use Anthos Config Management to sync configurations to the existing cluster and enable Binary Authorization for the trading images.
Why it's wrong here
Anthos Config Management helps enforce consistent configuration, and Binary Authorization controls which images can deploy, but neither provides an alternate region to run workloads. During a regional outage, the existing cluster is unreachable, so configuration sync and image policy do not restore service within the required RTO.
- ✓
Deploy a second regional GKE cluster in another region and use a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket for shared configuration, with a documented failover runbook.
Why this is correct
A standby regional GKE cluster in a different region provides compute capacity to restart workloads when the primary region fails. Because configuration is stored in a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket, it remains accessible during the failover, supporting a short RPO. A documented runbook ensures the team can perform failover within the 15-minute RTO.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Storage: Objects and Buckets
Key term
GKE
GKE is Google's managed Kubernetes service that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications in the cloud.
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.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
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.