Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
You are the lead cloud architect for a startup that runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a standard (zonal) cluster. The application is deployed with 3 replicas of a stateless frontend service. During a recent incident, a zone outage caused all GKE nodes to become unavailable, leading to application downtime of 45 minutes. You need to redesign the cluster to tolerate a single zone failure with no more than 5 minutes of downtime. Your budget allows for at most a 20% increase in compute costs. Which approach should you take?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse increasing replica count with achieving zone redundancy, failing to realize that replicas must be distributed across failure domains (zones) to survive a zone outage, and that regional persistent disks are irrelevant for stateless workloads.
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
✓
Migrate the cluster to a regional GKE cluster with nodes in 3 zones and distribute replicas across zones
D is correct because a regional GKE cluster distributes nodes across three zones, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining two zones continue serving traffic. By spreading the 3 replicas across zones (e.g., one per zone), the application tolerates a single zone outage with near-zero downtime, and the 20% cost increase covers the additional node pool overhead without exceeding the budget.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the number of replicas from 3 to 9 and keep the zonal cluster
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: all nodes in same zone still fail zone outage.
- ✗
Change the frontend deployment to use regional persistent disks
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: stateless app doesn't need persistent disks.
- ✗
Deploy second GKE cluster in another region and use global load balancer for failover
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: overkill and higher cost, exceeds budget increase.
- ✓
Migrate the cluster to a regional GKE cluster with nodes in 3 zones and distribute replicas across zones
Why this is correct
Correct: regional cluster survives zone failure.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Cloud Compute Options Overview
Key term
Anthos
Anthos is a Google Cloud platform that lets you run applications consistently across different computing environments, like on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds.
Key term
Node pool
A node pool is a group of virtual machines (nodes) within a container orchestration cluster that share the same configuration, such as machine size, operating system, and scaling settings, allowing you to manage them as a single unit.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PCA question from scratch — 807 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.