Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
Free Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud Architect practice — 6 questions on Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture, with explanations. No sign-up. Full 12-question mixed test →
A global trading platform requires an RPO of zero and an RTO under 60 seconds for its primary transactional database, and must remain fully available even if an entire GCP region fails. The team is evaluating database options for this tier. Which design BEST meets these requirements?
Cloud Spanner's multi-region configurations provide synchronous replication across regions with a 99.999% availability SLA, RPO of zero, and automatic failover well under a minute — the only option here that natively satisfies both RPO=0 and sub-60-second RTO across a full regional failure.
A company needs a hybrid connection between its on-premises data center and GCP that meets a 99.99% availability SLA and supports 10 Gbps of dedicated, non-internet-routed bandwidth. Which configuration should the architect implement?
Google's SLA for Dedicated Interconnect only reaches 99.99% when two connections are provisioned in different edge availability domains (ideally different metros), each with its own Cloud Router, eliminating single points of failure at the physical and routing layers.
A retailer runs a monolithic Java application on VMware with tightly coupled dependencies on the local file system and JVM configuration. The business has an 8-week deadline to exit the on-premises data center due to a lease expiration, and the team has no bandwidth to refactor the application before the deadline. Which migration approach should the architect recommend?
Migrate to Virtual Machines is purpose-built for rapid lift-and-shift of VMware VMs to Compute Engine with minimal application changes, making it the only option that realistically meets an 8-week hard deadline while preserving the existing tightly-coupled architecture for later modernization.
An organization uses a hub-and-spoke Shared VPC design with one host project and five service projects, each owned by a different application team. The security team requires that each team can only launch VM instances into the specific subnets assigned to their team, without being able to modify firewall rules or subnet configurations in the host project. Which configuration meets this requirement?
The Compute Network User role (roles/compute.networkUser) can be granted at the subnet level in a Shared VPC host project, allowing a service project team to attach VM instances to specific subnets without granting them any ability to modify firewall rules, routes, or subnet configuration.
A workload runs continuously 24/7 with a stable baseline of 200 vCPUs for a committed 3-year period, plus unpredictable traffic bursts of up to 100 additional vCPUs a few times per month. The architect must minimize cost while keeping the burst capacity flexible. Which combination of purchasing options should be used?
A 3-year resource-based Committed Use Discount gives the deepest possible discount (up to ~57%) on the predictable steady-state baseline, while leaving the unpredictable burst capacity on on-demand autoscaled instances preserves flexibility without a long-term commitment on capacity that isn't consistently used.
A financial services company must migrate its on-premises Oracle database to GCP with minimal application changes and near-zero downtime during cutover, ideally landing on a fully managed, PostgreSQL-compatible destination. Which migration approach should the architect choose?
Database Migration Service supports Oracle as a source for continuous, change-data-capture-based migration into AlloyDB for PostgreSQL (and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL), enabling ongoing replication until a low-downtime cutover — directly meeting the near-zero downtime and managed-destination requirements.
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