Google PCA Practice Question: Managing and Provisioning a Solution Infrastructure
A team is deploying a stateful application on GKE. They want to ensure that the application's pods are distributed across different zones for high availability and that during cluster upgrades, at least one pod remains available. Which THREE features should they configure?
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
✓
Pod topology spread constraints
Pod topology spread constraints distribute pods across zones. PodDisruptionBudget ensures minimum available pods during voluntary disruptions. Cluster autoscaler is not directly for availability, but for scaling nodes. StatefulSet is for stateful workloads but doesn't guarantee zone distribution without constraints.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Pod topology spread constraints
Why this is correct
This spreads pods across zones or other topology domains.
- ✓
StatefulSet for the application
Why this is correct
StatefulSet provides stable storage and ordering for stateful applications, and works with topology constraints and PDB.
- ✗
Cluster autoscaler
Why it's wrong here
Cluster autoscaler resizes the cluster, not directly related to pod availability.
- ✗
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
Why it's wrong here
HPA scales pods based on metrics, not availability.
- ✓
PodDisruptionBudget
Why this is correct
PDB ensures a minimum number of pods are available during voluntary disruptions like upgrades.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Virtual Machine Instances in Compute Engine
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
GKE
GKE is Google's managed Kubernetes service that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications in the cloud.
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