PCDE Practice Question: Deploy scalable and highly available databases in Google Cloud
A financial services firm runs a multi-region Spanner instance with the nam-eur-asia1 configuration. They need to ensure that if the leader region (us-central1) becomes unavailable, failover to another region occurs automatically within 1 minute. What is the expected RPO and RTO for this scenario?
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
✓
RPO ~ 15 seconds, RTO < 1 minute
Spanner multi-region configurations provide automatic failover with RTO under 1 minute. For the nam-eur-asia1 configuration, it is a multi-region with multiple read-write replicas. The RPO is approximately 15 seconds because Spanner uses quorum-based replication; in the event of a region failure, a small number of recent transactions may be uncommitted.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
RPO ~ 15 seconds, RTO < 1 minute
Why this is correct
This matches Spanner's documented RPO and RTO for multi-region failover.
- ✗
RPO ~ 0, RTO ~ 15 seconds
Why it's wrong here
RTO is under 1 minute but not typically 15 seconds; RPO is around 15 seconds, not zero.
- ✗
RPO ~ 1 hour, RTO ~ 5 minutes
Why it's wrong here
RPO is much lower and RTO is under 1 minute.
- ✗
RPO = 0, RTO < 1 minute
Why it's wrong here
Spanner multi-region does not guarantee zero data loss; RPO is about 15 seconds.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCDE 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 PCDE exam.