Question 101 of 955
Google PCA Design and plan a cloud solution architecture Practice Question
A global e-commerce platform is experiencing intermittent latency spikes during flash sales. The application is deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a regional cluster. The architecture includes a frontend service, a product catalog service using Cloud Spanner, and an order processing service using Cloud Pub/Sub. During high load, the catalog service shows increased query latency, and some requests time out. What should the architect prioritize to address the issue?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse horizontal scaling (adding nodes) with database optimization, overlooking that Cloud Spanner performance issues require schema-level tuning rather than infrastructure scaling.
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
✓
Enable Cloud Spanner interleaved tables and add secondary indexes for common query filters.
The issue is specifically with Cloud Spanner query latency under high load. Enabling interleaved tables and adding secondary indexes optimizes data locality and query performance, reducing the need for expensive cross-table joins and full table scans. This directly addresses the root cause of increased latency and timeouts in the catalog service.
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 Cloud CDN to cache product catalog responses.
Why it's wrong here
Caching can reduce load but does not address the root cause of Spanner query latency; also product data may be dynamic.
- ✗
Increase the number of nodes in the GKE node pool.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling nodes may help overall throughput but does not directly fix query performance issues in Cloud Spanner.
- ✓
Enable Cloud Spanner interleaved tables and add secondary indexes for common query filters.
Why this is correct
Secondary indexes and interleaved tables optimize query access patterns, reducing latency.
- ✗
Migrate the catalog service from Cloud Spanner to Cloud Bigtable for better read performance.
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is optimized for time-series data, not transactional queries with complex filters.
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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.
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