Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
Your company runs a stateless web application on Compute Engine. You want to ensure that if a zone fails, the application continues to serve traffic with minimal manual intervention. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between data backup (snapshots) and compute redundancy (MIGs), leading candidates to choose backup solutions when the question asks for continuous traffic serving during a zone failure.
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
✓
Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.
A regional managed instance group (MIG) distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining zones continue serving traffic. Combined with a global Cloud Load Balancer, traffic is automatically routed to healthy instances in any zone, providing high availability with minimal manual intervention. Autoscaling further ensures that new instances are created to handle load, even if a zone becomes unavailable.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Schedule regular snapshots of each instance's persistent disk to a regional bucket.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots capture disk state for recovery but do not restart or replace failed instances, so traffic is not served during a zone outage. It is tempting because snapshots are a genuine data-protection mechanism, but they would be the right choice for restoring corrupted or lost persistent disks, not for availability.
- ✓
Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.
Why this is correct
A regional managed instance group spreads instances across multiple zones, so a zone failure leaves capacity elsewhere, while the global Cloud Load Balancer directs traffic to healthy backends. Autoscaling maintains capacity, meeting the minimal-manual-intervention requirement for the stateless application.
- ✗
Use a global Cloud Load Balancer and enable Cloud CDN.
Why it's wrong here
A global Cloud Load Balancer with Cloud CDN distributes and caches traffic but does not itself create or replace instances in a surviving zone, so capacity is not restored. It is tempting because global load balancing is genuinely part of a resilient design, but it would be the right choice only alongside a managed instance group.
- ✗
Create an instance template and manually deploy instances in another zone.
Why it's wrong here
Manual deployment in another zone requires human action after the failure, which contradicts the minimal-intervention requirement. It is tempting because an instance template standardises configuration and is genuinely useful for repeatable provisioning, but it would be the right choice only when deployments are deliberately gated by an operator.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Virtual Machine Instances in Compute Engine
Key term
Instance group
An instance group is a collection of virtual machine instances that are managed as a single unit for scaling, load balancing, and lifecycle management in cloud computing.
Key term
Regional
Regional refers to a deployment strategy where cloud resources are distributed across multiple geographic areas to improve availability, reduce latency, and meet compliance requirements.
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.