Google PCA Manage and provision cloud infrastructure Practice Question
This PCA practice question tests your understanding of manage and provision cloud infrastructure. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. 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 runs a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Each service is deployed as a Deployment with resource requests and limits. After deploying a new version of a service, the pods start crashing with OOMKilled. The team increased the memory limits in the Deployment manifest, but the pods still crash after a few minutes. The cluster has cluster autoscaling enabled. The node pool has sufficient capacity. What is the most likely cause of the issue?
Clue words in this question
Noticing these words before you look at the options changes how you read each choice.
Clue: "most likely"
Why it matters: Probability qualifier — the question wants the most probable cause or outcome, not a guaranteed one. Eliminate low-probability options.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The application has a memory leak
Option C is correct because the pods are crashing with OOMKilled even after increasing memory limits, and the node pool has sufficient capacity. This indicates the application itself has a memory leak, where memory usage grows unbounded over time until it exceeds the new limit, causing the OOMKiller to terminate the pod. Increasing limits only delays the crash if the leak persists.
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.
✗
The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is configured with a wrong target metric
Why it's wrong here
HPA issues affect scaling, not memory exhaustion.
✗
The cluster autoscaler is not scaling up quickly enough
Why it's wrong here
If there is sufficient capacity, autoscaler is not the cause.
✓
The application has a memory leak
Why this is correct
Memory leak causes continuously increasing memory usage, leading to OOMKilled even with higher limits.
Clue confirmation
The clue word "most likely" in the question point toward this answer.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
The pods are hitting the node's ephemeral storage limit
Why it's wrong here
Disk pressure causes different errors (e.g., Evicted).
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse resource limits with scaling mechanisms, assuming that increasing limits or enabling autoscaling fixes memory exhaustion, rather than recognizing the application-level memory leak as the root cause.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
A memory leak occurs when the application allocates memory (e.g., via heap or goroutine stacks in Go) but fails to release it, causing the resident set size (RSS) to grow until it hits the cgroup memory limit set by Kubernetes. The OOMKiller is a Linux kernel mechanism that terminates processes exceeding their memory constraints; in GKE, this is enforced via cgroups v2 or v1. Real-world scenarios include unclosed database connections, goroutine leaks, or unbounded caches in microservices.
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
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.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this PCA question in full detail.
Manage and provision cloud infrastructure — This question tests Manage and provision cloud infrastructure — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: The application has a memory leak — Option C is correct because the pods are crashing with OOMKilled even after increasing memory limits, and the node pool has sufficient capacity. This indicates the application itself has a memory leak, where memory usage grows unbounded over time until it exceeds the new limit, causing the OOMKiller to terminate the pod. Increasing limits only delays the crash if the leak persists.
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.
Are there clue words in this question I should notice?
Yes — watch for: "most likely". Probability qualifier — the question wants the most probable cause or outcome, not a guaranteed one. Eliminate low-probability options.
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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