Google ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution Practice Question
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of planning and configuring a cloud solution. Compare every option against the stated constraints before choosing — the best answer satisfies all requirements, not just the most obvious one. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company wants to deploy a globally distributed, multi-tier application with strict low-latency communication between the web and database tiers. The database must be fully managed and able to survive a regional outage with automatic failover. Which combination is most appropriate?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Cloud Run (multi-region) and Cloud Spanner (multi-region)
Cloud Run (multi-region) provides a serverless compute layer that can automatically route traffic across regions for low-latency access, while Cloud Spanner (multi-region) offers a fully managed, globally distributed relational database with synchronous replication and automatic failover, ensuring strong consistency and regional outage survival without manual intervention. This combination meets the strict low-latency communication and automatic failover requirements for a multi-tier application.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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 Run (multi-region) and Cloud SQL (cross-region replica with manual failover)
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL cross-region replica requires manual promotion and is not automatic failover.
✗
Compute Engine regional managed instance group and Cloud SQL (regional with automatic failover)
Why it's wrong here
This handles a zonal failure but not a regional failure.
✗
App Engine (standard) and Cloud Datastore (multi-region)
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Datastore is not fully relational and may not meet low-latency requirements for multi-tier app.
✓
Cloud Run (multi-region) and Cloud Spanner (multi-region)
Why this is correct
Cloud Spanner provides automatic failover across regions with strong consistency, and Cloud Run can be deployed globally for low latency.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between zonal and regional resilience, where candidates mistakenly assume that Cloud SQL's regional automatic failover (which covers zonal outages) is sufficient for a regional outage, but the question explicitly requires survival of a regional outage, which demands a multi-region database like Spanner.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Cloud Spanner uses TrueTime and Paxos-based synchronous replication across regions to provide external consistency and automatic failover within 5-10 seconds, while Cloud Run multi-region leverages HTTPload balancing with regional backends to route requests to the nearest healthy instance, minimizing latency. In a real-world scenario, a global e-commerce platform would use this combination to ensure that a regional failure in, say, us-east1 does not impact users in europe-west1, as Spanner automatically promotes a replica in another region without data loss.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this ACE question in full detail.
Planning and configuring a cloud solution — This question tests Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Cloud Run (multi-region) and Cloud Spanner (multi-region) — Cloud Run (multi-region) provides a serverless compute layer that can automatically route traffic across regions for low-latency access, while Cloud Spanner (multi-region) offers a fully managed, globally distributed relational database with synchronous replication and automatic failover, ensuring strong consistency and regional outage survival without manual intervention. This combination meets the strict low-latency communication and automatic failover requirements for a multi-tier application.
What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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