Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
Your company's global e-commerce platform uses a managed instance group (MIG) in us-central1 and a Cloud Load Balancer. Traffic has grown, and you want to improve availability by distributing load across multiple regions. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Cloud CDN (which caches content) with multi-region backend distribution, or think that simply making the load balancer 'global' with a single backend achieves regional redundancy, when in fact you must add backends in multiple regions to distribute load and improve availability.
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 MIGs in additional regions and add them as backends to the existing global load balancer.
A global external HTTP(S) load balancer can have backends in multiple regions. By creating managed instance groups (MIGs) in additional regions and adding them as backends to the existing global load balancer, you distribute traffic across regions, improving availability and reducing latency for users worldwide. This approach leverages the load balancer's anycast IP and cross-region load balancing capabilities.
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 machine type of the existing instances to handle more traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing machine type scales vertically within us-central1, leaving the deployment single-region, so a regional outage still takes the platform down. It is tempting because resizing instances genuinely raises per-VM capacity for compute-bound workloads, which would be the right move when CPU or memory saturation—not regional resilience—is the actual constraint.
- ✗
Enable Cloud CDN to cache content closer to users.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN caches static content at edge locations, reducing latency and origin load, but it does not add compute capacity in other regions or provide regional failover. It suits read-heavy static content delivery, not multi-region availability.
- ✓
Create MIGs in additional regions and add them as backends to the existing global load balancer.
Why this is correct
Adding regional managed instance groups as backends to the existing global load balancer satisfies the multi-region availability requirement. A global external Application Load Balancer routes users to the closest healthy backend and performs cross-region failover, so capacity in additional regions absorbs traffic when one region degrades.
- ✗
Change the load balancer to global and configure a single backend.
Why it's wrong here
A single backend still points at the us-central1 MIG, so traffic is not distributed across regions and regional failover is absent. Global load balancing with multiple regional backends is what achieves the goal; one backend does not.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Load Balancing and Autoscaling
Key term
HTTP(S) Load Balancer
A network device or software that distributes incoming web traffic across multiple servers using HTTP or HTTPS protocols to ensure high availability, reliability, and performance.
Key term
HTTP
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the set of rules web browsers and servers use to communicate and transfer web pages over the internet.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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