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Design and plan a cloud solution architecture practice questions

This domain covers translating business and technical requirements into GCP designs: choosing compute, storage, networking, and security services, and defining reliability, scalability, and cost tradeoffs. Questions present scenarios (batch jobs, GKE microservices, credential handling) and ask you to select or sequence the most appropriate Google Cloud architecture.

Courseiva uses original exam-style practice questions designed for learning and revision. The goal is to understand the concepts, recognise exam patterns, and improve through explanations — not memorise copied exam dumps.

Editorial oversight:Johnson Ajibi· MSc IT Security, IEEE Senior Member
20 questionsDomain: Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
Practice 10 questionsBrowse domain →

What the exam tests

What to know about Design and plan a cloud solution architecture

Be able to map requirements to concrete GCP services and configurations, justifying cost, availability, and security choices. The single most important thing: match the workload's tolerance for interruption and its availability target to the right compute, storage, and security building blocks.

Selecting Compute Engine preemptible/Spot VMs for interruptible batch workloads to cut cost.

Designing regional GKE clusters with multi-zone node pools, autoscaling, and rolling updates.

Mapping Cloud IAM, Cloud KMS, Secret Manager, and VPC Service Controls to security needs.

Choosing managed services like Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage for durability and scale.

Watch out for

Common Design and plan a cloud solution architecture exam traps

  • ▸Picking always-on standard VMs for fault-tolerant batch jobs instead of Spot/preemptible instances, ignoring the stated cost goal.
  • ▸Confusing zonal and regional GKE cluster availability, or forgetting node pool autoscaling and surge upgrade settings.
  • ▸Leaving credentials in plaintext or instance metadata instead of using Secret Manager with least-privilege IAM.

Practice set

Design and plan a cloud solution architecture questions

20 questions · select your answer, then reveal the explanation

Question 1hardmulti select
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A financial services company is designing a multi-tier application on Google Cloud. The application must meet PCI DSS compliance, with data encrypted at rest and in transit. They plan to use Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for transactional data and Cloud Storage for archival data. Which TWO actions should the architect take to meet compliance requirements?

Question 2hardmultiple choice
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Refer to the exhibit. An architect created a VM instance using the above command. After the instance starts, the architect tries to access the nginx default page from the internet but gets a timeout. What is the most likely reason?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

gcloud compute instances create my-instance \
  --zone=us-central1-a \
  --machine-type=e2-micro \
  --image-family=debian-11 \
  --image-project=debian-cloud \
  --boot-disk-size=20GB \
  --boot-disk-type=pd-standard \
  --network-interface=subnet=default,no-address \
  --metadata=startup-script='#! /bin/bash
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install -y nginx
    sudo systemctl enable nginx
    sudo systemctl start nginx'
Question 3easymultiple choice
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A media streaming company is deploying a new video transcoding pipeline on Google Cloud. The pipeline receives raw video files uploaded to Cloud Storage, triggers a Cloud Function that submits transcoding jobs to a Compute Engine worker pool, and stores the transcoded output in another Cloud Storage bucket. The workers are managed by a managed instance group (MIG) running a custom container image. Currently, when there is a spike in uploads, the MIG takes 5-7 minutes to scale up new workers, causing processing delays. The architect needs to reduce the time to add new workers to under 2 minutes. The workers are stateless and the container image is about 2 GB. What should the architect do?

Question 4hardmultiple choice
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A financial services company is designing a multi-region disaster recovery architecture for a critical application. The application runs on Compute Engine with a stateful backend using Cloud Spanner. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 1 hour, and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 15 minutes. What architecture meets these requirements cost-effectively?

Question 5mediummatching
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Match each Google Cloud service to its primary purpose.

Drag a concept onto its matching description — or click a concept then click the description.

Concepts
Matches

Distribute traffic across instances

Cache content at edge locations

Protect against DDoS and web attacks

Enable outbound internet for private instances

Dedicated connection between on-prem and GCP

Question 6hardmultiple choice
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A company has a hub-and-spoke VPC topology with multiple on-premises locations connected via Cloud VPN to the hub VPC. They notice IP conflicts because overlapping CIDR ranges are used in different spokes. The network team wants to allow communication between spokes without re-IPing. What should they do?

Question 7mediummultiple choice
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An organization has multiple Google Cloud projects that need to access a shared Cloud SQL database. The database should only be accessible from authorized projects. What is the most secure way to grant access?

Question 8hardmultiple choice
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A company is building a real-time data pipeline that ingests events from IoT devices, processes them with Apache Beam, and stores results in BigQuery for analytics. The pipeline must handle spikes in traffic and guarantee exactly-once processing. Which combination of services should they use?

Question 9mediummulti select
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Which TWO statements are true regarding the benefits of using VPC Network Peering over Cloud VPN for connecting two VPC networks?

Question 10easymultiple choice
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A startup is building a web application that experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. They want a scalable solution that minimizes costs. Which Google Cloud service should they use to run their containerized application?

Question 11easymultiple choice
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You need to store object data that is accessed infrequently (once a quarter) but must be retained for 10 years for compliance. Which storage class is the most cost-effective?

Question 12mediummultiple choice
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A company is designing a multi-region architecture for disaster recovery. Their primary region is us-central1 and they want a warm standby in another region. The application runs on Compute Engine with a stateful backend. Which approach minimizes RTO while keeping costs reasonable?

Question 13mediummultiple choice
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A financial services company requires that all data stored in Cloud Storage be encrypted with keys they manage, rotate, and audit. They also need to enforce encryption at the bucket level. Which configuration should they use?

Question 14hardmultiple choice
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A company has a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance with high read traffic. They want to offload read queries without modifying the application. Which strategy should they implement?

Question 15mediummulti select
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Which TWO actions reduce egress costs when transferring data from Compute Engine to the internet? (Choose 2)

Question 16mediummulti select
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Which THREE are best practices for designing a highly available Cloud SQL for MySQL instance? (Choose 3)

Question 17hardmulti select
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A company wants to deploy a stateful application with strict low-latency requirements across multiple zones in a single region. They need to minimize inter-zone latency. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose 3)

Question 18hardmultiple choice
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A company is migrating a critical on-premises application to Google Cloud. The application consists of a frontend web server that handles user requests and a backend database server that stores session state and processed data. The application is stateful because session data is stored in memory on the backend server. The company wants to minimize downtime during migration and ensure that the application can scale horizontally in the future. The current on-premises architecture has the web server and database server on separate physical machines. The web server communicates with the database server via a private network. The company expects that after migration, the application will need to handle double the current traffic. They also need to ensure that the architecture is resilient to zone failures within a single region. They are considering using Compute Engine for both the web and database servers, but they are open to other Google Cloud services. They have a requirement that the database must be relational and support ACID transactions. The database currently uses Microsoft SQL Server, but they are willing to migrate to a different database engine if it reduces operational overhead and provides better scalability. The team has limited experience with Google Cloud and wants to minimize architectural changes. Which course of action should the company take?

Question 19mediummultiple choice
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Refer to the exhibit. A user alice@example.com is unable to list objects in bucket 'bucket-b'. What is the most likely reason?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

```json
{
  "bindings": [
    {
      "role": "roles/storage.objectViewer",
      "members": ["user:alice@example.com"],
      "condition": {
        "title": "only_bucket_a",
        "expression": "resource.name.startsWith('projects/_/buckets/bucket-a/')"
      }
    }
  ]
}
```
Question 20hardmultiple choice
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Refer to the exhibit. A user creates a snapshot of a persistent disk. Later, they want to create a new VM from this snapshot in the same project but in a different region (europe-west1). Which step is missing or incorrect?

Network Topology
gcloud compute instances listfilter='name:my-instance'format='value(name,zone,status,networkInterfaces[0].networkIP,disks[0].deviceName)'zone=us-central1format='value(name,sizeGb,type,users)'gcloud compute snapshots listfilter='sourceDisk:my-instance-disk'format='value(name,sourceDisk,diskSizeGb,creationTimestamp)'source-disk=my-instance-disksource-disk-zone=us-central1asyncNAME ZONE STATUS NETWORK_IP DEVICE_NAMEmy-instance us-central1 RUNNING 10.128.0.2 my-instance-diskmy-instance-disk 100 pd-standard us-central1-a/instances/my-instanceNo snapshots found.Output:Operation [operation-12345] is running...
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Frequently asked questions

What does the PCA exam test about Design and plan a cloud solution architecture?
Be able to map requirements to concrete GCP services and configurations, justifying cost, availability, and security choices. The single most important thing: match the workload's tolerance for interruption and its availability target to the right compute, storage, and security building blocks.
How should I use these practice questions?
Select your answer before revealing the explanation. Then read why each option is right or wrong — this active recall approach builds retention far faster than re-reading notes.
Can I practise just Design and plan a cloud solution architecture questions in a focused session?
Yes — the session launcher on this page draws every question from the Design and plan a cloud solution architecture domain. Use a 10-question session first to gauge your baseline, then move to 20 or 30 once the weak spots are clear.
Where can I practise other PCA topics?
Use the topic links above to move to related areas, or go back to the PCA question bank to see all topics.
Are these real exam questions or dumps?
These are original practice questions written to test the same concepts the PCA exam covers. They are not copied from any real exam or dump site.