Google Professional Cloud Architect (PCA) — Questions 976–1000

Your organization stores critical financial data in Cloud Storage. You need to ensure that if an object is deleted or overwritten, you can recover it within 30 days. What feature should you enable?

Refer to the exhibit. The SLO for the payments-api service is 99.9% availability over 30 days. The current compliance is 99.89% and the error budget is exhausted. Which action should the SRE team take FIRST?

A company needs to store archival data that is accessed less than once a year and must be retained for 10 years for compliance. The data retrieval time is not critical. Which Cloud Storage class is MOST cost-effective?

A company has a GKE cluster with Workload Identity enabled. A pod needs to access a BigQuery dataset in a different project. The team has created a service account in the pod's project and granted it BigQuery Data Viewer on the dataset. They also created an IAM policy binding between the Kubernetes service account and the Google service account. The pod still gets permission denied. What is missing?

An engineering team wants to perform load testing on their new microservices-based application deployed on GKE. They need a tool that can simulate thousands of concurrent users, generate detailed performance metrics, and integrate with Cloud Monitoring. Which tool should they use?

A company runs an e-commerce platform on Google Cloud. The application is deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a regional cluster (us-central1, three zones). The frontend service is exposed via an HTTP Load Balancer with Cloud CDN. Recently, during a flash sale, users experienced high latency and occasional 502 errors. The backend service is a Java application that reads from Cloud Spanner. The team has observed that Spanner CPU utilization averaged 65% during the sale, with a few spikes to 80%. The number of frontend pods was auto-scaled to 50, each running on n1-standard-2 nodes. The node pool is set to autoscale up to 100 nodes. The errors appear to correlate with periods of high CPU on the nodes, but not always. What is the most likely cause and recommended action?

A team is designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for a critical application. Which THREE components are essential for a robust DR plan? (Choose 3)

A financial services company requires a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency and horizontal scalability to serve a multi-region banking application. Write conflicts are rare. Which database should they choose?

A startup is designing a real-time leaderboard for a multiplayer game. The leaderboard must update within seconds of a score change and handle millions of concurrent players. Strong consistency is not required, but availability is critical. Which database is most suitable?

A company is using Cloud Functions (2nd gen) for event-driven processing of uploaded images in Cloud Storage. Each image is resized to multiple sizes and stored back in different buckets. Recently, the number of uploads has increased 10x, and the team notices that some images are not being processed, and logs show function execution timeouts after 60 seconds. The function's timeout is set to 60 seconds. The code processes images sequentially. The team needs to reliably process all images with minimal code changes. What should they do?

A company wants to automatically rotate cryptographic keys on a schedule without manual intervention. Which service should they use?

A team needs to set up alerting for a production service. They want to receive notifications when the 99th percentile latency exceeds 500ms for 5 minutes. Which two Cloud Monitoring components are required? (Choose two.)

You are configuring a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy to notify your SRE team when the error rate of a service exceeds 5% over a 5-minute window. Which type of metric evaluation should you use?

Your company runs a critical application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in us-central1. The application consists of a frontend deployment with 3 replicas and a backend statefulset with 5 replicas using persistent volumes (SSD). Recently, the team noticed that during a regional outage in us-central1, the application became completely unavailable. They want to design a multi-region architecture that can survive a regional failure with RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 30 minutes. The application is stateless on the frontend but the backend stores critical data on persistent disks. The backend can operate in a read-only mode from a secondary region if needed. They have a limited budget and want to minimize ongoing costs. Which approach should they take?

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to a microservices architecture on GKE. They want to gradually shift traffic from the monolith to the new services. They also need to route requests based on headers (e.g., for A/B testing). Which GKE feature should they use?

A user wants to store a database password that will be used by a Compute Engine instance. What is the most secure and manageable approach?

A company wants to implement a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application running on Compute Engine with state stored on persistent disks. They need an RTO of less than 15 minutes and an RPO of less than 1 hour. Which TWO steps should they take? (Choose two.)

A company uses Google Cloud Armor to protect their HTTP load balancer from OWASP Top 10 attacks. After deploying a security policy with pre-configured WAF rules, they notice that some legitimate user requests are being blocked because they match a rule incorrectly. The security team wants to fine-tune the rules to reduce false positives while maintaining strong protection. They also want to evaluate the impact of changes before enforcing them. What should they do?

Your company uses HA VPN to connect on-premises to Google Cloud. You need to ensure the VPN connection meets a 99.99% SLA. Which configuration is required?

A company hosts a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and wants to protect against SQL injection attacks. Which service should they configure?

A global financial services company needs to store transaction data with strong consistency across multiple regions, low latency (single-digit milliseconds), and the ability to scale writes horizontally. They also require SQL query capabilities. Which TWO database services meet these requirements?

A company wants to run a containerized application that scales down to zero when not in use and only incurs costs when requests are being processed. They do not want to manage infrastructure. Which compute service should they use?

Refer to the exhibit. An engineer created an instance with a startup script that references a Cloud Storage bucket. The instance boots but the startup script fails. What is the most likely cause?

A startup uses Cloud Functions with a Pub/Sub trigger to process incoming orders. They notice that the function sometimes fails to process messages, and those messages are lost. What is the most likely cause?

A developer wants to monitor the CPU usage of a single Compute Engine VM and receive alerts when it exceeds 80%. What is the simplest way to achieve this?