Google Cloud Certified High Availability and Disaster Recovery 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company has an RPO of 4 hours for a Cloud SQL database. What backup strategy satisfies this requirement at minimum cost?
- Continuous replication to a read replica
- Automated backups every 4 hours with point-in-time recovery enabled (Correct answer)
- Daily backups with manual restore procedures
- Synchronous multi-region replication
Correct answer: Automated backups every 4 hours with point-in-time recovery enabled
Automated backups every 4 hours combined with point-in-time recovery ensures data loss is limited to at most 4 hours, meeting the RPO requirement.
Question 2: Which GKE feature helps ensure a minimum number of pods remain available during voluntary disruptions like node upgrades?
- Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
- Pod Disruption Budget (PDB) (Correct answer)
- Resource Quotas
- LimitRange
Correct answer: Pod Disruption Budget (PDB)
Pod Disruption Budgets define the minimum number of pods that must remain available during voluntary disruptions, preventing outages during maintenance.
Question 3: What is the purpose of health checks in a GCP Managed Instance Group?
- Monitor network throughput
- Automatically detect and replace unhealthy VM instances (autohealing) (Correct answer)
- Control access to VMs
- Scale instances based on CPU usage
Correct answer: Automatically detect and replace unhealthy VM instances (autohealing)
MIG autohealing uses health checks to detect unhealthy instances and automatically recreate them, maintaining the desired instance count and availability.
Question 4: A GCP architect is designing a system where a Cloud Run service must continue operating even if a GCP region goes down. What is the recommended approach?
- Deploy the service in a single region with high CPU limits
- Deploy Cloud Run services in multiple regions behind a Global Load Balancer (Correct answer)
- Use Cloud Run minimum instances set to 100
- Enable Cloud Run traffic splitting across revisions
Correct answer: Deploy Cloud Run services in multiple regions behind a Global Load Balancer
Deploying Cloud Run services across multiple regions with a Global Load Balancer ensures regional failover and continuous availability during outages.
Question 5: Which disaster recovery pattern offers the lowest RTO but highest cost in GCP?
- Backup and Restore
- Pilot Light
- Warm Standby
- Hot Standby (Multi-Site Active-Active) (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Hot Standby (Multi-Site Active-Active)
Hot Standby / Multi-Site Active-Active keeps identical production environments running in all regions simultaneously, enabling near-zero RTO at maximum cost.
Question 6: An organization wants to test their GCP disaster recovery plan without causing a production outage. Which approach is best?
- Failover the production system manually
- Conduct a chaos engineering or DR simulation in a non-production environment (Correct answer)
- Restore a backup to the production database
- Shut down production for 1 hour monthly
Correct answer: Conduct a chaos engineering or DR simulation in a non-production environment
DR simulations and chaos engineering tests in non-production environments validate recovery procedures without risking production availability.
Google Cloud Certified High Availability and Disaster Recovery 2
A company has an RPO of 4 hours for a Cloud SQL database.
What backup strategy satisfies this requirement at minimum cost?