PCDE Practice Question: Deploy scalable and highly available databases in Google Cloud
A company uses Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration. They want to perform a non-destructive disaster recovery drill to validate their ability to recover from a regional failure. Which THREE steps should they include in the drill? (Choose three.)
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
✓
Validate that the restored instance has the correct data and schema.
A non-destructive DR drill for Spanner should test the ability to restore from a backup to a different region (simulating recovery), validate the restored data integrity, and update runbooks based on lessons learned. Failing over a read replica is not applicable to Spanner (it uses multi-region replication, not read replicas). Stopping the primary instance is destructive. Changing leader region is a configuration change that may affect live traffic.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Validate that the restored instance has the correct data and schema.
Why this is correct
Data integrity validation is critical to ensure the backup is usable and the recovery process works.
- ✓
Restore a Spanner backup to a new instance in a different region.
Why this is correct
This tests the restore process and validates that backups are restorable in a different region, simulating recovery from a regional failure.
- ✓
Update the disaster recovery runbook with any issues found during the drill.
Why this is correct
Continuous improvement of runbooks based on drill findings ensures better preparedness for actual failures.
- ✗
Stop the primary Spanner instance to simulate a region failure and observe automatic failover.
Why it's wrong here
Stopping the instance is destructive and may cause actual downtime. DR drills should be non-destructive.
- ✗
Promote a cross-region read replica to a new primary instance.
Why it's wrong here
Spanner does not use read replicas like Cloud SQL. Spanner's multi-region replication handles failover automatically; promoting a read replica is not a valid Spanner concept.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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