PCNE Configuring Network Services Practice Question
A company has a VPC with subnets in us-east1 and europe-west1. They have deployed a global external HTTP(S) load balancer with backend services in both regions. Users in Europe report high latency. What is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that high latency is always caused by health check or firewall issues, when in fact session affinity can override geographic routing and force traffic to a distant backend.
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
✓
Session affinity set to CLIENT_IP, causing sticky sessions to a distant backend
CLIENT_IP session affinity causes the load balancer to hash the client's IP address to a specific backend instance. If a user in Europe is hashed to a backend in us-east1, all their requests will be forwarded to that distant region, resulting in high latency. This occurs even though a healthy backend exists in europe-west1, because the affinity overrides the load balancer's normal least-latency or proximity-based routing.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Incorrect health check configuration causing backends to be marked unhealthy
Why it's wrong here
Would cause errors, not high latency.
- ✗
Firewall rules blocking traffic from the load balancer's health check probes
Why it's wrong here
Health checks are separate from user traffic.
- ✗
The load balancer is not enabled for global access
Why it's wrong here
Global load balancer is global by default.
- ✓
Session affinity set to CLIENT_IP, causing sticky sessions to a distant backend
Why this is correct
Traffic might be pinned to us-east1 even for European users.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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