Question 1,175 of 1,446
PCDE Practice Question: Deploy scalable and highly available databases in Google Cloud
A startup is building a mobile app and needs a fully managed database that scales automatically for unpredictable workloads. They expect moderate read/write traffic with occasional spikes. They want minimal operational overhead and do not need global distribution. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?
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 Firestore in native mode
Cloud Firestore is fully managed, serverless, auto-scales, and ideal for mobile apps with moderate traffic. Cloud SQL requires manual scaling. Bigtable is overkill and complex for this workload. Spanner is designed for global scale and is more complex than needed.
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 SQL for PostgreSQL with HA
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL requires instance sizing and does not auto-scale for unpredictable spikes.
- ✗
Cloud Spanner regional
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Spanner regional provides strong transactional consistency and horizontal scaling across nodes, but its architecture is designed for globally distributed, sharded workloads requiring atomicity across regions—not for the unpredictable, moderate-traffic spikes of a single-region mobile app. It is tempting because it is fully managed and scales automatically, yet its node-based scaling incurs higher cost and operational complexity than necessary. Cloud Spanner would be correct for a globally distributed financial application needing strong consistency across continents.
- ✓
Cloud Firestore in native mode
Why this is correct
Firestore is serverless, auto-scaling, fully managed, and suitable for mobile backends with moderate traffic.
- ✗
Cloud Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is designed for high-throughput, low-latency workloads at petabyte scale, with higher operational overhead and cost.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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Last reviewed: Jul 4, 2026
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.
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