This PCA practice question tests your understanding of manage and provision cloud infrastructure. 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 migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Google Cloud. They need to manage service-to-service authentication and authorization. Which service should they use?
Cloud NAT
Why wrong: Cloud NAT provides outbound internet access, not service authentication.
Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy
Why wrong: Cloud IAP is designed for external user access, not internal service communication.
Cloud Endpoints
Why wrong: Cloud Endpoints manages APIs but does not provide mutual TLS between services.
Service Mesh (Anthos)
Anthos Service Mesh provides mTLS, authorization policies, and observability for microservices.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Service Mesh (Anthos)
Service Mesh (Anthos) provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication, including mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication, fine-grained authorization policies, and observability. It uses sidecar proxies (Envoy) to intercept traffic and enforce security policies without modifying application code, making it ideal for microservices authentication and authorization.
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 NAT
Why it's wrong here
Cloud NAT provides outbound internet access, not service authentication.
Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy
Why it's wrong here
Cloud IAP is designed for external user access, not internal service communication.
Cloud Endpoints
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Endpoints manages APIs but does not provide mutual TLS between services.
Service Mesh (Anthos)
Why this is correct
Anthos Service Mesh provides mTLS, authorization policies, and observability for microservices.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates often confuse Cloud Endpoints (API management for external clients) with the internal service-to-service security needs of microservices, or assume Cloud IAP can be extended to internal traffic, but IAP only works for user-facing HTTP(S) requests and cannot enforce policies between backend services.
Detailed technical explanation
Under the hood, Anthos Service Mesh deploys an Envoy sidecar proxy alongside each microservice pod. These proxies enforce mutual TLS (mTLS) for encrypted and authenticated connections, and support Istio's AuthorizationPolicy CRD for role-based access control (RBAC) at the HTTP or gRPC level. In a real-world scenario, this allows a payments service to reject requests from any service not explicitly granted permission, even if they are on the same Kubernetes cluster, preventing lateral movement in case of a breach.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
A company's IT admin needs to give a contractor read-only access to production logs without sharing account credentials. Using role-based access control (RBAC) and temporary scoped permissions — not a permanent shared password — is the correct pattern. Questions like this test whether you can apply least-privilege access across cloud identity services.
What to study next
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FAQ
Manage and provision cloud infrastructure — This question tests Manage and provision cloud infrastructure — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Service Mesh (Anthos) — Service Mesh (Anthos) provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication, including mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication, fine-grained authorization policies, and observability. It uses sidecar proxies (Envoy) to intercept traffic and enforce security policies without modifying application code, making it ideal for microservices authentication and authorization.
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 25, 2026
This PCA 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 PCA exam.
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