Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
Your company is deploying a new application on Google Cloud and needs to ensure that it can meet a 99.9% availability SLA. You are designing the architecture for high availability. Which two practices should you implement? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that a global load balancer alone provides high availability, when it must be paired with multi-zone deployment and autohealing to be effective.
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
✓
Implement health checks and autohealing for managed instance groups.
To achieve high availability, you should deploy across multiple zones within a region to survive zone failures and implement health checks with autohealing to automatically recover from instance failures. These two practices together ensure that the application remains available even when individual instances or zones fail, helping to meet a 99.9% 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.
- ✓
Implement health checks and autohealing for managed instance groups.
Why this is correct
Health checks and autohealing ensure that unhealthy instances are automatically recreated. This maintains the desired capacity and availability of the application. When combined with multi-zone deployment, autohealing helps recover from instance failures quickly, contributing to meeting high availability SLAs.
- ✗
Use a single global load balancer to distribute traffic across all instances.
Why it's wrong here
A global load balancer is useful for distributing traffic, but it does not by itself ensure high availability if the backend instances are in a single zone. It must be combined with multi-zone deployment. A global load balancer can route traffic to healthy instances, but if all instances are in one zone, a zone failure still causes an outage.
- ✓
Deploy the application across multiple zones within a single region.
Why this is correct
Deploying across multiple zones within a region protects against zone-level failures. Google Cloud regions have multiple zones, and spreading resources across them ensures that if one zone fails, the application remains available from other zones. This is a fundamental practice for achieving high availability and is often required to meet SLAs like 99.9%.
- ✗
Use a single zone with a high-capacity machine type to reduce complexity.
Why it's wrong here
Using a single zone creates a single point of failure. If that zone experiences an outage, the application becomes unavailable. While a high-capacity machine might handle load, it does not mitigate zone failures. This practice is not suitable for high availability and would likely prevent meeting a 99.9% SLA.
- ✗
Store application state on a local SSD attached to each instance.
Why it's wrong here
Local SSDs are ephemeral and tied to the instance's lifecycle. If an instance fails or is replaced, the data is lost. For high availability, state should be stored in a durable, replicated service like Cloud Storage or Cloud SQL. Using local SSDs increases the risk of data loss and does not support high availability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Virtual Machine Instances in Compute Engine
Key term
CAN
A CAN (Controller Area Network) is a robust vehicle bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other without a host computer.
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.
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 and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
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.