Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect (PCA) practice questions

Domain coverage 6 domains

• Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture (~25%)
• Managing and Provisioning a Solution Infrastructure (~17.5%)
• Designing for Security and Compliance (~17.5%)
• Analyzing and Optimizing Technical and Business Processes (~15%)
• Managing Implementation (~12.5%)
• Ensuring Solution and Operations Excellence (~12.5%)

Sample questions 9 of 81 shown

1. Q1 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   You are working at a financial institution that stores mortgage loan approval documents on Cloud Storage. Any change to these approval documents must be uploaded as a separate approval file. You need to ensure that these documents cannot be deleted or overwritten for the next 5 years. What should you do?

   1. Create a retention policy on the bucket for the duration of 5 years. Create a lock on the retention policy.
   2. Create a retention policy organizational constraint constraints/storage.retentionPolicySeconds at the organization level. Set the duration to 5 years.
   3. Use a customer-managed key for the encryption of the bucket. Rotate the key after 5 years.
   4. Create a retention policy organizational constraint constraints/storage.retentionPolicySeconds at the project level. Set the duration to 5 years.

   A. Object hold (retention policy) on the Cloud Storage bucket prevents object deletion or modification until the hold is removed, ensuring no changes to loan approval documents. Versioning (B) keeps versions but doesn't prevent modification. Lifecycle rules (C) manage deletion. IAM (D) controls access.
2. Q2 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   Your company is building a new architecture to support its data-centric business focus. You are responsible for setting up the network. Your company's mobile and web-facing applications will be deployed on-premises, and all data analysis will be conducted in GCP. The plan is to process and load 7 years of archived .csv files totaling 900 TB of data and then continue loading 10 TB of data daily. You currently have an existing 100-MB internet connection. What actions will meet your company's needs?

   1. Compress and upload both archived files and files uploaded daily using the gsutil ג€"m option.
   2. Lease a Transfer Appliance, upload archived files to it, and send it to Google to transfer archived data to Cloud Storage. Establish a connection with Google using a Dedicated Interconnect or Direct Peering connection and use it to upload files daily.
   3. Lease a Transfer Appliance, upload archived files to it, and send it to Google to transfer archived data to Cloud Storage. Establish one Cloud VPN Tunnel to VPC networks over the public internet, and compress and upload files daily using the gsutil ג€"m option.
   4. Lease a Transfer Appliance, upload archived files to it, and send it to Google to transfer archived data to Cloud Storage. Establish a Cloud VPN Tunnel to VPC networks over the public internet, and compress and upload files daily.

   B. BigQuery is the ideal serverless data warehouse for data-centric analytics. Cloud SQL (A) is OLTP with scale limits. Cloud Spanner (C) is globally distributed transactional. Cloud Dataplex (D) governs data.
3. Q3 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   You are developing a globally scaled frontend for a legacy streaming backend data API. This API expects events in strict chronological order with no repeat data for proper processing. Which products should you deploy to ensure guaranteed-once FIFO (first-in, first-out) delivery of data?

   1. Cloud Pub/Sub alone
   2. Cloud Pub/Sub to Cloud Dataflow
   3. Cloud Pub/Sub to Stackdriver
   4. Cloud Pub/Sub to Cloud SQL

   B. Pub/Sub with ordering keys ensures messages are processed in strict chronological order within each key. Dataflow (A) processes streams but doesn't guarantee strict ordering by itself. Apache Kafka (C) requires management. Cloud Scheduler (D) is for cron jobs.
4. Q4 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   You need to deploy an application to Google Cloud. The application receives traffic via TCP and reads and writes data to the filesystem. The application does not support horizontal scaling. The application process requires full control over the data on the file system because concurrent access causes corruption. The business is willing to accept a downtime when an incident occurs, but the application must be available 24/7 to support their business operations. You need to design the architecture of this application on Google Cloud. What should you do?

   1. Use a managed instance group with instances in multiple zones, use Cloud Filestore, and use an HTTP load balancer in front of the instances.
   2. Use a managed instance group with instances in multiple zones, use Cloud Filestore, and use a network load balancer in front of the instances.
   3. Use an unmanaged instance group with an active and standby instance in different zones, use a regional persistent disk, and use an HTTP load balancer in front of the instances.
   4. Use an unmanaged instance group with an active and standby instance in different zones, use a regional persistent disk, and use a network load balancer in front of the instances.

   D. Compute Engine provides TCP-based VMs with persistent disks for file system storage, ideal for the TCP application. GKE (A) is for containers. Cloud Run (B) is serverless HTTP/S. App Engine (C) is PaaS.
5. Q5 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   You are working at a sports association whose members range in age from 8 to 30. The association collects a large amount of health data, such as sustained injuries. You are storing this data in BigQuery. Current legislation requires you to delete such information upon request of the subject. You want to design a solution that can accommodate such a request. What should you do?

   1. Use a unique identifier for each individual. Upon a deletion request, delete all rows from BigQuery with this identifier.
   2. When ingesting new data in BigQuery, run the data through the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API to identify any personal information. As part of the DLP scan, save the result to Data Catalog. Upon a deletion request, query Data Catalog to find the column with personal information.
   3. Create a BigQuery view over the table that contains all data. Upon a deletion request, exclude the rows that affect the subject's data from this view. Use this view instead of the source table for all analysis tasks.
   4. Use a unique identifier for each individual. Upon a deletion request, overwrite the column with the unique identifier with a salted SHA256 of its value.

   A. Healthcare Natural Language API extracts medical insights from unstructured health data. Cloud DLP (B) identifies PII. BigQuery (C) analyzes structured data. AutoML Natural Language (D) requires training.
6. Q6 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   Your company is designing its application landscape on Compute Engine. Whenever a zonal outage occurs, the application should be restored in another zone as quickly as possible with the latest application data. You need to design the solution to meet this requirement. What should you do?

   1. Create a snapshot schedule for the disk containing the application data. Whenever a zonal outage occurs, use the latest snapshot to restore the disk in the same zone.
   2. Configure the Compute Engine instances with an instance template for the application, and use a regional persistent disk for the application data. Whenever a zonal outage occurs, use the instance template to spin up the application in another zone in the same region. Use the regional persistent disk for the application data.
   3. Create a snapshot schedule for the disk containing the application data. Whenever a zonal outage occurs, use the latest snapshot to restore the disk in another zone within the same region.
   4. Configure the Compute Engine instances with an instance template for the application, and use a regional persistent disk for the application data. Whenever a zonal outage occurs, use the instance template to spin up the application in another region. Use the regional persistent disk for the application data.

   B. Regional managed instance group distributes instances across zones within a region for zonal outage protection. Multi-region (A) spans continents. Global MIG (C) isn't a GCP concept. Single-zone MIG (D) is a single point of failure.
7. Q7 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   Your company has just acquired another company, and you have been asked to integrate their existing Google Cloud environment into your company's data center. Upon investigation, you discover that some of the RFC 1918 IP ranges being used in the new company's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) overlap with your data center IP space. What should you do to enable connectivity and make sure that there are no routing conflicts when connectivity is established?

   1. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, create a Cloud Router, and apply new IP addresses so there is no overlapping IP space.
   2. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, and create a Cloud NAT instance to perform NAT on the overlapping IP space.
   3. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, create a Cloud Router, and apply a custom route advertisement to block the overlapping IP space.
   4. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, and apply a firewall rule that blocks the overlapping IP space.

   B. Organization policy constraint uses resource.location restriction to prevent resource creation outside allowed regions for compliance. IAM (A) controls access. VPC SC (C) prevents data exfiltration. Audit Logs (D) record activity.
8. Q8 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   You need to deploy a stateful workload on Google Cloud. The workload can scale horizontally, but each instance needs to read and write to the same POSIX filesystem. At high load, the stateful workload needs to support up to 100 MB/s of writes. What should you do?

   1. Use a persistent disk for each instance.
   2. Use a regional persistent disk for each instance.
   3. Create a Cloud Filestore instance and mount it in each instance.
   4. Create a Cloud Storage bucket and mount it in each instance using gcsfuse.

   C. Filestore provides managed NFS shares accessible by multiple instances for stateful workloads that need shared reads/writes. Persistent Disk (A) is single-instance. Cloud Storage (B) is object storage. Cloud SQL (D) is relational DB.
9. Q9 Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

   Your company has an application deployed on Anthos clusters (formerly Anthos GKE) that is running multiple microservices. The cluster has both Anthos Service Mesh and Anthos Config Management configured. End users inform you that the application is responding very slowly. You want to identify the microservice that is causing the delay. What should you do?

   1. Use the Service Mesh visualization in the Cloud Console to inspect the telemetry between the microservices.
   2. Use Anthos Config Management to create a ClusterSelector selecting the relevant cluster. On the Google Cloud Console page for Google Kubernetes Engine, view the Workloads and filter on the cluster. Inspect the configurations of the filtered workloads.
   3. Use Anthos Config Management to create a namespaceSelector selecting the relevant cluster namespace. On the Google Cloud Console page for Google Kubernetes Engine, visit the workloads and filter on the namespace. Inspect the configurations of the filtered workloads.
   4. Reinstall istio using the default istio profile in order to collect request latency. Evaluate the telemetry between the microservices in the Cloud Console.

   A. Sandbox (namespace-level isolation) enables microservices development without interference. Workspace (B) organizes projects, not isolation. Dev/test project (C) adds cost. Artifact Registry (D) stores images.

Answer all 81 questions with instant feedback →

Reader reviews 139 ratings

• The PCA practice questions were incredibly helpful. The detailed explanations made all the difference. Passed on my first attempt!

  ★★★★★★ James K.

• Honestly, I wouldn’t have passed PCA without these. The explanations actually teach you instead of just giving the answer.

  ★★★★★★ Jordan P.

• Comprehensive coverage for PCA. Every domain is represented and the question difficulty ramps up nicely.

  ★★★★★★ Emma J.

• Good investment for the PCA exam. My only regret is not buying it sooner — would have saved me a lot of study time.

  ★★★★★★ Henry C.

• Had to renew my PCA certification and used this to refresh. Way more efficient than re-reading the official study guide.

  ★★★★★★ Leo D.

• I bought the PCA question bank a week before my exam and passed with 90%+. The questions are that good.

  ★★★★★ Maria V.

Frequently asked questions

Free study resources

Community-verified analysis of 31 questions from real test-taker discussions — 9 deep analyses and 0 FAQs.

More Google exams