This ACE practice question tests your understanding of deploying and implementing a cloud solution. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. 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 organization is deploying a stateful application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application requires persistent storage with high read/write performance and must be available across multiple zones for disaster recovery. Which storage solution should they use?
Cloud Filestore
Why wrong: Cloud Filestore is a file share, not block storage, and is less performant for stateful apps.
Regional persistent disk
Regional persistent disk replicates across zones, providing high performance and DR.
Local SSD
Why wrong: Local SSD is ephemeral and tied to a node, not persistent or multi-zone.
Zonal persistent disk
Why wrong: Zonal persistent disk is only in one zone, not multi-zone.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Regional persistent disk
Regional persistent disks provide synchronous replication across two zones in the same region, ensuring data availability during a zonal failure. They offer high read/write performance suitable for stateful applications and can be attached to GKE pods via PersistentVolumeClaims, meeting the requirement for multi-zone disaster recovery.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
Cloud Filestore
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Filestore is a file share, not block storage, and is less performant for stateful apps.
Regional persistent disk
Why this is correct
Regional persistent disk replicates across zones, providing high performance and DR.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Local SSD
Why it's wrong here
Local SSD is ephemeral and tied to a node, not persistent or multi-zone.
Zonal persistent disk
Why it's wrong here
Zonal persistent disk is only in one zone, not multi-zone.
Common exam traps
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between zonal and regional persistent disks, where candidates mistakenly choose zonal disks for high performance without considering the multi-zone disaster recovery requirement, or they confuse Cloud Filestore's shared file access with the block storage performance needed for stateful applications.
Detailed technical explanation
Regional persistent disks use synchronous replication at the block level between two zones, ensuring that writes are committed in both zones before acknowledging the write to the application. This provides a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of minutes during a zonal failure. In GKE, you can use a StorageClass with `replication-type: regional-pd` and topology constraints to automatically provision volumes across zones, which is critical for stateful workloads like databases (e.g., Cassandra or MySQL) that require consistent storage failover.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
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.
What to study next
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FAQ
Deploying and implementing a cloud solution — This question tests Deploying and implementing a cloud solution — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Regional persistent disk — Regional persistent disks provide synchronous replication across two zones in the same region, ensuring data availability during a zonal failure. They offer high read/write performance suitable for stateful applications and can be attached to GKE pods via PersistentVolumeClaims, meeting the requirement for multi-zone disaster recovery.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 30, 2026
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.
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