Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability →mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
Your company runs a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance for a global financial application. The SLA requirement is 99.999% availability. You need to ensure that the database remains available during a regional outage. What configuration should you use?
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
✓
Use a multi-region configuration (e.g., nam3) with automatic replication across multiple regions.
Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations (e.g., nam3, eur3) automatically replicate data across regions within a continent. They provide 99.999% availability SLA. A single-region configuration offers 99.99% SLA. Read replicas (as in Cloud SQL) are not a concept in Spanner. Multi-region configs use multiple read-write regions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use a dual-region configuration with two regions but only one for writes.
Why it's wrong here
Spanner multi-region configurations include multiple read-write regions; dual-region is not a standard term.
- ✗
Use a single-region configuration with a read replica in another region.
Why it's wrong here
Spanner does not have read replicas; it uses multi-region configs for geographic redundancy.
- ✓
Use a multi-region configuration (e.g., nam3) with automatic replication across multiple regions.
Why this is correct
Multi-region configurations provide synchronous replication across regions and 99.999% SLA.
- ✗
Configure a single-region instance and create periodic backups to restore in another region.
Why it's wrong here
Backups do not provide automatic failover; recovery would take significant time and not meet 99.999%.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
Cloud Spanner
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, globally distributed relational database service from Google Cloud that combines the benefits of relational database structure with horizontal scalability and strong consistency.
Key term
Cloud SQL
Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that lets you set up, maintain, and scale SQL databases (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server) in the cloud without managing the underlying infrastructure.
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