Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
This PCA practice question tests your understanding of ensure solution and operations reliability. 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.
A company is designing a highly available application on GCE. Which TWO steps should they take to ensure reliability?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use a managed instance group with autohealing.
Option B is correct because a managed instance group (MIG) with autohealing automatically replaces unhealthy VM instances based on health check results, ensuring the application remains available even if individual instances fail. This is a core reliability pattern for stateless applications on Compute Engine, as it provides self-healing infrastructure without manual intervention.
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.
✗
Use a global external HTTP(S) load balancer.
Why it's wrong here
Good but not specifically for instance-level reliability.
✓
Use a managed instance group with autohealing.
Why this is correct
Automatically replaces unhealthy instances.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✓
Configure health checks that check the application endpoint.
Why this is correct
Ensures traffic only goes to healthy instances.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Use persistent disks without snapshots.
Why it's wrong here
No data recovery option.
✗
Deploy instances in a single zone to avoid latency.
Why it's wrong here
Single zone is a single point of failure.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between load balancing (traffic distribution) and instance-level recovery (autohealing), causing candidates to incorrectly select a global load balancer as the sole reliability measure without recognizing the need for health-check-driven instance replacement.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Autohealing in MIGs relies on the health check probe (e.g., HTTP GET to a specific path) to determine instance health; if the probe fails consecutively (default: 2 failures), the MIG terminates the instance and creates a new one from the instance template. This mechanism uses the same health check configuration as the load balancer, but autohealing operates independently at the instance group level, ensuring recovery even if the load balancer is not in use. In real-world scenarios, autohealing prevents cascading failures by quickly replacing instances that become unresponsive due to memory leaks or application crashes.
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
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.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this PCA question in full detail.
Ensure solution and operations reliability — This question tests Ensure solution and operations reliability — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Use a managed instance group with autohealing. — Option B is correct because a managed instance group (MIG) with autohealing automatically replaces unhealthy VM instances based on health check results, ensuring the application remains available even if individual instances fail. This is a core reliability pattern for stateless applications on Compute Engine, as it provides self-healing infrastructure without manual intervention.
What should I do if I get this PCA 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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