Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability →hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
Your company uses Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration to achieve 99.999% availability. You need to understand the impact of a regional failure on read and write availability. Which statement is correct?
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
✓
Writes are unavailable if the region containing the leader replica fails, but reads remain available
Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations use a voting protocol. For read-write operations, a majority of replicas must be available. If one region fails, writes may be impacted if the remaining regions do not have a majority. However, reads can still be served from healthy replicas in other regions (though they may be stale).
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Both reads and writes are fully available as long as at least one region remains healthy
Why it's wrong here
Writes require majority; one region may not be enough.
- ✗
Reads and writes remain fully available because Cloud Spanner uses synchronous replication across all regions
Why it's wrong here
Synchronous replication still requires majority for writes.
- ✓
Writes are unavailable if the region containing the leader replica fails, but reads remain available
Why this is correct
Leader region failure can cause write unavailability until a new leader is elected; reads can still be served.
- ✗
Writes are always available, but reads may be unavailable if the region with the closest replica fails
Why it's wrong here
Writes are not always available if majority is lost.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
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.
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.
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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.