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PCD Practice Question: Designing highly scalable, available, and reliable cloud-native applications
A company is using Cloud Run for a stateless API. They want to ensure that the service can handle sudden traffic spikes. Which two features should they configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
The PCD exam often tests the misconception that Cloud Load Balancing is required for scaling Cloud Run, but Cloud Run's built-in autoscaling and managed HTTPS load balancer already handle traffic spikes; the trap is that candidates confuse external load balancing with internal scaling mechanisms.
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
✓
Enable container concurrency.
Enabling container concurrency allows a single Cloud Run container instance to handle multiple requests simultaneously, up to the configured concurrency limit (default 80, max 1000). This improves throughput and resource utilization during traffic spikes without requiring additional instances. Option D is correct because setting max instances to a high value ensures the service can scale out to handle sudden load by creating more container instances, up to the configured maximum, preventing cold starts and request queuing.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Enable container concurrency.
Why this is correct
Container concurrency allows multiple requests per container, increasing throughput.
- ✗
Use Cloud Load Balancing.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Run already distributes traffic; an external LB is not needed for a single service.
- ✗
Enable CPU always on allocation.
Why it's wrong here
CPU always on is for background processing, not scaling.
- ✓
Set max instances to a high value.
Why this is correct
High max instances allows scaling out to handle more requests.
- ✗
Set min instances to zero to save cost.
Why it's wrong here
Zero min instances causes cold starts during spikes.
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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.