Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Practice Questions
Prepare for GCP-PCA with more than an answer.
Unlock the full exam and previous versions
- v1Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect 190 questions Current
- PCALegacy Professional Cloud Architect 440 questions Locked
- Exam fee
- $200 USD
- Time limit
- 120 minutes
- Questions on the exam
- 50-60
- Passing score
- Not disclosed (pass/fail only; estimated ~70%) (scale Not disclosed)
- Level
- Professional
- Valid for
- 2 years
Domains covered on the exam 6
- Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture25%
- Managing and Provisioning a Solution Infrastructure18%
- Designing for Security and Compliance17%
- Analyzing and Optimizing Technical and Business Processes15%
- Managing Implementation13%
- Ensuring Solution and Operations Excellence12%
- 1
You are implementing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on Compute Engine. The RTO is 4 hours and RPO is 1 hour. You want to minimize costs while meeting these targets. Which strategy should you choose?
Show answer details
Correct answer: C
A Pilot Light strategy involves keeping the critical core (like database replication) active to meet the RPO, but keeping application servers and other compute resources turned off (or using IaC to provision them) until a disaster occurs. This fits the 4-hour RTO well (time to boot/provision) and significantly reduces costs compared to Hot or Warm standby.
- 2
Your development team uses Terraform to manage infrastructure. A recent deployment failed because a manual change was made to a firewall rule in the console, causing a state conflict. You need to implement a process to detect and prevent this in the future. What should you do? (Select TWO)
Show answer details
Correct answer: B, C
Automating
terraform planin CI/CD ensures that the intended state is compared against the actual state before applying, highlighting any discrepancies caused by manual changes.Removing write access (Editor/Owner) from humans in production is the most effective way to prevent manual configuration drift (ClickOps). Changes must go through the code repository and pipeline.
- 3
A financial services company processes sensitive credit card data. They require that no Google support personnel have access to their encryption keys, even during a support ticket investigation. Which key management solution must be implemented?
Show answer details
Correct answer: C
While CMEK gives you control over the keys, the keys technically still reside within Google's infrastructure (KMS). To guarantee Google personnel cannot access the keys or data, you need External Key Manager (EKM) where the keys are stored outside Google Cloud, combined with Key Access Justifications (KAJ) which provides a reason for every decryption request that the external manager can approve or deny.
- 4
You are migrating a 50 TB Oracle Data Warehouse to Google Cloud. The business requires a fully managed serverless data warehouse that supports SQL and can handle petabyte-scale analytics. You also need to minimize the migration downtime. Which combination of services should you use?
Show answer details
Correct answer: A
BigQuery is the serverless, petabyte-scale data warehouse. For migrating Oracle data, BigQuery Data Transfer Service (often leveraging agents or third-party connectors) or Datastream can be used. Given the context of 'serverless data warehouse', BigQuery is the target. The Data Transfer Service is the native tool for this.
- 5
A multinational financial institution is designing a low-latency trading platform. The architecture requires sub-millisecond processing times for transaction data ingestion and immediate consistency for account balances across three global regions (US, Europe, Asia). The solution must handle regional outages without manual intervention and provide 99.999% availability. Which data architecture provides the optimal balance of consistency, availability, and global scale?
Show answer details
Correct answer: C
Cloud Spanner is the only service that offers strong global consistency (external consistency) via TrueTime, high availability (99.999% for multi-region), and horizontal scalability. It is specifically designed for financial ledger use cases requiring immediate consistency across regions. Bigtable offers eventual consistency. Cloud SQL promotion is manual or slower (RTO > 0) and does not offer active-active global writes with strong consistency.
- 6
You are advising a healthcare provider on a hybrid network design. They require a dedicated 20 Gbps connection between their on-premises datacenter and Google Cloud to transfer sensitive patient records. Compliance regulations mandate that all traffic must be encrypted at the wire level, and the connection must not traverse the public internet. Which connectivity solution meets these strict requirements?
Show answer details
Correct answer: A
Dedicated Interconnect provides private, high-bandwidth (10 Gbps or 100 Gbps) connectivity. To meet the requirement of wire-level encryption without using the public internet, MACsec (Media Access Control Security) is the supported method for securing traffic directly on the Interconnect link. HA VPN over Interconnect is another option but adds IPsec overhead; MACsec is layer 2 encryption specifically for high-speed protection.
