This PCA practice question tests your understanding of ensure solution and operations reliability. This is a configuration task: choose the command set that satisfies every stated requirement. Small differences — like 'secret' vs 'password' or 'transport input ssh' vs 'all' — change whether the answer is correct. 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 has a Spanner instance for global transactions. They need to ensure reliability during a regional outage. What is the best approach?
Clue words in this question
Noticing these words before you look at the options changes how you read each choice.
Clue: "best"
Why it matters: Signals that multiple options may be partially correct. Choose the option that most directly solves the exact problem described, not the one that sounds most complete.
Spanner is already resilient across zones; use backup/restore for regions.
Why wrong: Without multi-region, regional outage causes unavailability.
Use multiple instances in different regions.
Why wrong: Complex sharding logic needed.
Enable multi-region configuration with read-only replicas.
Automatic failover and read scalability.
Enable leader placement option.
Why wrong: Optimizes write latency, not failover.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Enable multi-region configuration with read-only replicas.
Spanner's multi-region configuration with read-only replicas provides global transactional consistency and automatic failover without manual intervention. Read-only replicas can serve reads locally and, in the event of a regional outage, one can be promoted to a read-write replica to maintain availability. This approach ensures reliability during a regional outage while preserving Spanner's strong consistency guarantees.
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.
Spanner is already resilient across zones; use backup/restore for regions.
Why it's wrong here
Without multi-region, regional outage causes unavailability.
Use multiple instances in different regions.
Why it's wrong here
Complex sharding logic needed.
Enable multi-region configuration with read-only replicas.
Why this is correct
Automatic failover and read scalability.
Clue confirmation
The clue word "best" in the question point toward this answer.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Enable leader placement option.
Why it's wrong here
Optimizes write latency, not failover.
Common exam traps
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that multiple independent instances (Option B) are needed for cross-region resilience, when in fact Spanner's multi-region configuration with read-only replicas provides built-in global high availability without application changes.
Detailed technical explanation
In a multi-region Spanner configuration, read-only replicas maintain a consistent copy of data using the same Paxos-based replication protocol as read-write replicas, but they cannot participate in leader elections or accept writes. During a regional outage, Spanner automatically promotes a read-only replica in an unaffected region to a read-write replica, ensuring continued write availability. This mechanism relies on Spanner's TrueTime API and global clock synchronization to maintain external consistency even across regions.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
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FAQ
Ensure solution and operations reliability — This question tests Ensure solution and operations reliability — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Enable multi-region configuration with read-only replicas. — Spanner's multi-region configuration with read-only replicas provides global transactional consistency and automatic failover without manual intervention. Read-only replicas can serve reads locally and, in the event of a regional outage, one can be promoted to a read-write replica to maintain availability. This approach ensures reliability during a regional outage while preserving Spanner's strong consistency guarantees.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Yes — watch for: "best". Signals that multiple options may be partially correct. Choose the option that most directly solves the exact problem described, not the one that sounds most complete.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 30, 2026
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