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ACE Practice Question: An e-commerce application has a read-heavy…
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of an e-commerce application has a read-heavy…. 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.
An e-commerce application has a read-heavy database workload: 95% reads, 5% writes. The primary Cloud SQL instance is experiencing CPU saturation during peak read traffic. What is the most appropriate GCP-native solution that minimizes changes to application code?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Best answer
Create Cloud SQL read replicas and route read queries to the replica endpoint.
Read replicas receive replicated data from the primary and serve SELECT queries. Application code only needs different connection strings for reads vs. writes — minimal changes.
B
Distractor review
Migrate from Cloud SQL to Cloud Spanner for unlimited horizontal read scalability.
Spanner is a valid long-term solution but requires significant migration effort (schema redesign, application rewrite). Read replicas solve the immediate problem with minimal disruption.
C
Distractor review
Enable Cloud SQL high availability; the standby replica will serve read traffic.
Cloud SQL HA's standby instance is for failover only — it does not serve read traffic. Only dedicated read replicas can serve read queries.
D
Distractor review
Scale the primary Cloud SQL instance vertically to a larger machine type.
Vertical scaling has a ceiling and addresses all traffic on one instance. Read replicas horizontally scale read capacity and are specifically designed for read-heavy workloads.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Key takeaway
NAT direction and interface roles matter as much as the IP address mapping. Inside/outside designation controls which traffic is translated.
Related practice questions
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Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
What is the correct order of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy from highest to lowest level?
Question 2
A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?
Question 3
Which gcloud command creates a Compute Engine VM named 'web-01' using the e2-medium machine type in zone us-central1-a?
Question 4
A team wants to receive an email alert when the average CPU utilization of VMs in a managed instance group exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. What should they create in Cloud Monitoring?
Question 5
A junior developer needs read-only access to all GCP resources in a project. Which IAM role grants the minimum permissions required?
Question 6
A startup creates its first Google Cloud project. Before deploying any paid resources, what must be linked to the project?
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this ACE question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Create Cloud SQL read replicas and route read queries to the replica endpoint. — Cloud SQL supports read replicas — additional database instances that receive replicated writes from the primary and can serve read-only queries. Applications are updated to route read queries to the replica endpoint and writes to the primary endpoint. This offloads 95% of the traffic from the primary with minimal code changes (just a different connection string for reads). In-region and cross-region read replicas are supported for Cloud SQL.
What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?
Review the four NAT address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global), PAT port overload, and static vs dynamic NAT use cases. Then practise related ACE NAT questions on configuration and troubleshooting.
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This ACE 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 ACE exam.