Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
This PCA practice question tests your understanding of ensure solution and operations reliability. 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.
You are the lead cloud architect for a startup that runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a standard (zonal) cluster. The application is deployed with 3 replicas of a stateless frontend service. During a recent incident, a zone outage caused all GKE nodes to become unavailable, leading to application downtime of 45 minutes. You need to redesign the cluster to tolerate a single zone failure with no more than 5 minutes of downtime. Your budget allows for at most a 20% increase in compute costs. Which approach should you take?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Migrate the cluster to a regional GKE cluster with nodes in 3 zones and distribute replicas across zones
D is correct because a regional GKE cluster distributes nodes across three zones, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining two zones continue serving traffic. By spreading the 3 replicas across zones (e.g., one per zone), the application tolerates a single zone outage with near-zero downtime, and the 20% cost increase covers the additional node pool overhead without exceeding the budget.
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.
✗
Increase the number of replicas from 3 to 9 and keep the zonal cluster
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: all nodes in same zone still fail zone outage.
✗
Change the frontend deployment to use regional persistent disks
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: stateless app doesn't need persistent disks.
✗
Deploy second GKE cluster in another region and use global load balancer for failover
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: overkill and higher cost, exceeds budget increase.
✓
Migrate the cluster to a regional GKE cluster with nodes in 3 zones and distribute replicas across zones
Why this is correct
Correct: regional cluster survives zone failure.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse increasing replica count with achieving zone redundancy, failing to realize that replicas must be distributed across failure domains (zones) to survive a zone outage, and that regional persistent disks are irrelevant for stateless workloads.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
A regional GKE cluster uses a control plane that is replicated across zones, and node pools can be configured with --node-locations to span multiple zones. Under the hood, the Kubernetes scheduler uses node affinity rules (e.g., podAntiAffinity with topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone) to ensure pods are spread across zones, preventing a single zone failure from taking down all replicas. In practice, this design also handles zonal control plane outages because the regional control plane remains available via the remaining zones.
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 startup's cloud architect reviews their monthly bill and notices costs are higher than expected for a long-running batch job. Switching from on-demand instances to Reserved Instances — or using Spot/Preemptible VMs — can reduce compute costs by up to 72 %. Questions like this test whether you understand the tradeoffs between commitment, flexibility, and cost across cloud pricing models.
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: Migrate the cluster to a regional GKE cluster with nodes in 3 zones and distribute replicas across zones — D is correct because a regional GKE cluster distributes nodes across three zones, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining two zones continue serving traffic. By spreading the 3 replicas across zones (e.g., one per zone), the application tolerates a single zone outage with near-zero downtime, and the 20% cost increase covers the additional node pool overhead without exceeding the budget.
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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