Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
To achieve a 99.999% availability SLA for a globally distributed application using Cloud Spanner, which configuration is required?
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
✓
Multi-region instance configuration
Cloud Spanner multi-region configuration provides 99.999% SLA. Single-region offers 99.99%. Fine-grained access control and customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) do not affect availability SLA.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Multi-region instance configuration
Why this is correct
A multi-region instance configuration replicates data across regions with synchronous quorum writes, which is the only Spanner topology whose SLA reaches 99.999%. Regional configurations cap at 99.99%, so multi-region satisfies the availability constraint in the stem.
- ✗
Fine-grained access control
Why it's wrong here
Fine-grained access control governs who may read or write rows and columns; it has no bearing on replica placement or regional failover. It is tempting because it is a genuine Cloud Spanner security feature, and it would be the right answer when the requirement is column-level authorisation rather than a 99.999% multi-region SLA.
- ✗
Single-region instance configuration
Why it's wrong here
A single-region instance provides 99.99% availability, one nine short of the target, because it lacks multi-region replication and automatic regional failover. Single-region suits latency-sensitive workloads that accept 99.99% and do not require the 99.999% multi-region SLA.
- ✗
Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
Why it's wrong here
CMEK governs encryption key ownership and rotation, not replication topology, so it cannot raise availability to 99.999%; that SLA requires a multi-region instance configuration. CMEK is correct when the requirement is customer-controlled keys for compliance rather than availability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Key term
Spanner
Google Cloud's globally distributed, strongly consistent, and horizontally scalable database service designed for mission-critical, transactional workloads.
Key term
Least privilege
Least privilege is a security principle that means giving users, systems, or programs only the minimum permissions they need to do their job and nothing more.
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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.