hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
PDE Practice Question: A financial services company uses Cloud Composer…
A financial services company uses Cloud Composer to orchestrate a daily workflow that includes a Dataproc job for risk analysis. The workflow sometimes fails because the Dataproc cluster creation times out. The cluster creation typically takes 3 minutes, but occasionally takes over 10 minutes. What is the most effective way to handle this variability?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume retries or timeout adjustments are sufficient for infrastructure variability, but the most effective solution is to eliminate the variable step entirely by reusing a persistent cluster.
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
✓
Create a long-running Dataproc cluster that remains idle and reuse it for each workflow.
Creating a long-running Dataproc cluster and reusing it eliminates the variable cluster creation time that causes timeouts. Cloud Composer (Airflow) can manage cluster lifecycle separately from the workflow, ensuring the cluster is always available when the Dataproc job runs. This approach decouples cluster provisioning from job execution, making the workflow resilient to creation delays.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create a long-running Dataproc cluster that remains idle and reuse it for each workflow.
Why this is correct
Reusing an existing cluster eliminates the creation step and associated timeout.
- ✗
Implement a retry loop with exponential backoff in the DAG.
Why it's wrong here
Retries may still hit timeouts if the issue persists.
- ✗
Use preemptible VMs for the cluster to reduce cost and improve creation speed.
Why it's wrong here
Preemptible VMs may have longer creation times due to resource availability.
- ✗
Increase the cluster creation timeout in the Airflow configuration.
Why it's wrong here
This merely masks the problem without addressing the root cause.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PDE question from scratch — 890 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PDE 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 PDE exam.