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PCD Practice Question: Designing highly scalable, available, and reliable cloud-native applications
A company is building a real-time analytics application on Google Cloud that ingests data from thousands of IoT devices. The data must be processed with sub-second latency and stored in a time-series database for querying. Which combination of services provides the best scalability and availability?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Cloud Bigtable with Cloud Datastore or Cloud SQL, not realizing that Bigtable is the only Google Cloud database purpose-built for high-throughput, low-latency time-series and analytical workloads at scale.
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
✓
Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable
Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database designed for large analytical and operational workloads, offering sub-10ms latency for time-series data. Combined with Cloud Pub/Sub for ingesting high-throughput IoT data and Cloud Dataflow for stream processing, this combination provides the best scalability and availability for real-time analytics with sub-second latency requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Datastore
Why it's wrong here
Datastore is not optimized for time-series with high write throughput.
- ✗
Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is relational and not ideal for time-series scalability.
- ✗
Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Storage
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Storage is for object storage, not real-time queries.
- ✓
Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable
Why this is correct
Bigtable is ideal for high-throughput time-series data with low-latency access.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCD 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 PCD exam.