Designing highly scalable, available, and reliable cloud-native applications →mediumMultiple SelectObjective-mapped
PCD Practice Question: Designing highly scalable, available, and reliable cloud-native applications
A company is designing a cloud-native application on Google Kubernetes Engine. They want to ensure high availability and scalability for their microservices. Which two best practices should they follow?
⚠ Common exam trap
The PCD exam often tests the misconception that high availability requires a single cluster per region, but the trap is that true resilience demands multi-zone or multi-region deployment to survive zonal failures, not just cluster redundancy.
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
✓
Use horizontal pod autoscaling based on custom metrics.
Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) based on custom metrics allows the application to automatically scale the number of pod replicas in response to application-specific signals (e.g., requests per second, queue depth) rather than just CPU/memory. This ensures that each microservice can handle varying load efficiently, maintaining high availability and scalability without over-provisioning.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use a single cluster per region.
Why it's wrong here
Multiple clusters per region may be needed for higher availability.
- ✗
Use a single replica for each service to reduce cost.
Why it's wrong here
Single replica is a single point of failure.
- ✓
Use horizontal pod autoscaling based on custom metrics.
Why this is correct
HPA allows scaling based on application-specific metrics.
- ✗
Use stateful sets for all services.
Why it's wrong here
StatefulSets are only needed for stateful applications.
- ✓
Deploy services across multiple zones.
Why this is correct
Multi-zone deployment protects against zone failures.
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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.