PCD — frequently asked questions

nam3 is a North America multi-region configuration. It can provide multi-region availability within North America, but it does not place replicas in Europe or Asia, so users there still read across an ocean.

More nodes add CPU and memory capacity and help avoid load-induced latency, but geographic latency is mainly reduced by choosing a multi-region configuration with replicas near users.

No. Two instances are separate databases without Spanner's global consistency or multi-region 99.999% SLA; Dataflow replication would be asynchronous and not equivalent.

Gemini Cloud Assist returns a targeted SSD-versus-Standard comparison in seconds, directly inside the Console where you are configuring the VM. The documentation is authoritative but spans several pages you must read and synthesize yourself, which conflicts with the question's speed requirement.

Reference architectures in the Cloud Architecture Center are designed to show end-to-end application patterns, not single-resource comparisons like SSD versus Standard Persistent Disks. They would not directly answer the specific trade-off question you have.

Metric absence fires when a metric stops reporting, but missing data can also be caused by agent restarts or collection gaps, and the scenario names no application metric to watch. Process health directly counts matching processes and reports when none have been available for the configured duration.

Yes. Process-health conditions rely on process metrics collected from the host by the Stackdriver Monitoring Agent (or the Ops Agent's process monitoring), which is why the question states the agent is installed and no application changes are possible.

Use an uptime check when you need to verify that an endpoint or resource responds to an HTTP(S), TCP, or SSL request from outside the host. It tests reachability of a service, not the presence of a local Unix process.