Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
Your team manages a service with a 99.9% uptime SLO over a 30-day window. The error budget for this period is 43 minutes. In the first week, outages consumed 30 minutes of the budget. You are planning a new release. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that a canary release (Option D) is always safe, but the trap here is that it still consumes error budget and does not solve the underlying reliability deficit when the budget is already critically low.
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
✓
Delay the release and focus on improving reliability to rebuild the error budget.
With only 13 minutes of error budget remaining after the first week, proceeding with the release (Option B) risks exhausting the budget entirely from any unforeseen issues, violating the 99.9% SLO. Delaying the release (Option C) allows the team to focus on reliability improvements, such as implementing canary deployments, adding circuit breakers, or enhancing monitoring with tools like Prometheus and Grafana, to rebuild the error budget over the remaining 23 days. This aligns with the principle of using error budgets to balance innovation with reliability, as defined in Google's SRE practices.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Reduce the SLO to 99.8% to increase the error budget.
Why it's wrong here
Changing SLO post-hoc undermines reliability culture.
- ✗
Proceed with the release because the remaining budget is sufficient.
Why it's wrong here
13 minutes is a small buffer; a single outage could exhaust it.
- ✓
Delay the release and focus on improving reliability to rebuild the error budget.
Why this is correct
Conservative approach: wait until more error budget is earned (e.g., through flawless operation) before releasing.
- ✗
Release the feature but only to a small percentage of users.
Why it's wrong here
Canary releases can reduce risk, but the question implies a full release; even a canary uses error budget if it fails.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
Error budget
An error budget is the maximum amount of acceptable downtime or failure a system can experience within a specified period while still meeting its Service Level Objective (SLO).
Key term
SLO
A Service Level Objective is a measurable target for a specific aspect of a service's performance or reliability that a team commits to meeting over a defined period.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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