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 stateful application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that requires persistent storage and low-latency access across multiple zones. The application needs to perform well even during zonal failures. Which storage solution should they use?
Zonal persistent disk with snapshots to another zone
Why wrong: Snapshots are not real-time; failover would cause data loss.
Local SSDs attached to nodes
Why wrong: Local SSDs are ephemeral and cannot survive node failure.
Cloud Filestore
Why wrong: Filestore is file storage, not block, and may not meet latency requirements.
Regional persistent disk
Regional PD replicates across zones and provides high availability.
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 (RPDs) synchronously replicate data across two zones in the same region, providing both the persistent storage and low-latency access required by the stateful application. This ensures that if one zone fails, the disk can be attached to a pod in the surviving zone without data loss or significant performance degradation, meeting the high-availability and multi-zone access requirements.
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.
Zonal persistent disk with snapshots to another zone
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots are not real-time; failover would cause data loss.
Local SSDs attached to nodes
Why it's wrong here
Local SSDs are ephemeral and cannot survive node failure.
Cloud Filestore
Why it's wrong here
Filestore is file storage, not block, and may not meet latency requirements.
Regional persistent disk
Why this is correct
Regional PD replicates across zones and provides high availability.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates confuse high-availability features like snapshots or local SSDs with true synchronous replication, overlooking that only regional persistent disks provide both persistence and zero-RPO failover across zones without manual restore steps.
Detailed technical explanation
Regional persistent disks use synchronous replication at the block level between two zones within the same region, ensuring a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of seconds when used with GKE's pod rescheduling. Under the hood, GKE leverages the CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver to attach RPDs to pods, and the disk can be mounted as ReadWriteOnce (RWO) or ReadOnlyMany (ROM) but not ReadWriteMany (RWX), which is a common subtlety. In a real-world scenario, a stateful database like Cassandra or MySQL can use RPDs to survive a zone outage without manual intervention, as the disk is automatically reattached to a new pod in the healthy zone.
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
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: Regional persistent disk — Regional persistent disks (RPDs) synchronously replicate data across two zones in the same region, providing both the persistent storage and low-latency access required by the stateful application. This ensures that if one zone fails, the disk can be attached to a pod in the surviving zone without data loss or significant performance degradation, meeting the high-availability and multi-zone access requirements.
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
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