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.
Your company runs a stateless web application on Compute Engine. You want to ensure that if a zone fails, the application continues to serve traffic with minimal manual intervention. What should you do?
Schedule regular snapshots of each instance's persistent disk to a regional bucket.
Why wrong: Snapshots are for backup and restore, not for automatic failover.
B
Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.
A regional MIG with autoscaling across zones and a global load balancer ensures traffic is rerouted away from failed zones and instances are automatically replaced.
C
Use a global Cloud Load Balancer and enable Cloud CDN.
Why wrong: Cloud CDN improves latency but does not handle instance failure recovery.
D
Create an instance template and manually deploy instances in another zone.
Why wrong: Manual action is not minimal intervention; automating with MIGs is required.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.
A regional managed instance group (MIG) distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining zones continue serving traffic. Combined with a global Cloud Load Balancer, traffic is automatically routed to healthy instances in any zone, providing high availability with minimal manual intervention. Autoscaling further ensures that new instances are created to handle load, even if a zone becomes unavailable.
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.
✗
Schedule regular snapshots of each instance's persistent disk to a regional bucket.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots are for backup and restore, not for automatic failover.
✓
Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer.
Why this is correct
A regional MIG with autoscaling across zones and a global load balancer ensures traffic is rerouted away from failed zones and instances are automatically replaced.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Use a global Cloud Load Balancer and enable Cloud CDN.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN improves latency but does not handle instance failure recovery.
✗
Create an instance template and manually deploy instances in another zone.
Why it's wrong here
Manual action is not minimal intervention; automating with MIGs is required.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between data backup (snapshots) and compute redundancy (MIGs), leading candidates to choose backup solutions when the question asks for continuous traffic serving during a zone failure.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
A regional MIG uses zonal instance templates and can span multiple zones; the global Cloud Load Balancer uses anycast IP and health checks to route traffic only to healthy instances. Under the hood, the load balancer's health probes (e.g., HTTP health checks) detect instance failures within seconds, and the MIG's autohealing policy can automatically recreate unhealthy instances. In a real-world scenario, if a zone experiences a network partition, the load balancer will stop sending traffic to instances in that zone, and the MIG can scale up in other zones to compensate, ensuring near-continuous availability.
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.
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: Create a regional managed instance group with an autoscaling policy and use a global Cloud Load Balancer. — A regional managed instance group (MIG) distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring that if one zone fails, the remaining zones continue serving traffic. Combined with a global Cloud Load Balancer, traffic is automatically routed to healthy instances in any zone, providing high availability with minimal manual intervention. Autoscaling further ensures that new instances are created to handle load, even if a zone becomes unavailable.
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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