10 free, exam-style Professional Cloud Architect (PCA) practice questions with answers and explanations. No signup required. Work through them below, then take the full free PCA practice test to study every exam domain.
The PCA exam has 60 questions and runs 2 hours 0 minutes.
These 10 free PCA questions are organized by exam domain, so you can see how each part of the Professional Cloud Architect blueprint is tested. Reveal the answer and explanation under each question.
A financial services company is building a global order-processing system. It requires a single relational database that supports SQL, guarantees strong (externally consistent) transactions across multiple continents, and scales horizontally to handle unpredictable write growth without sharding. Which Google Cloud service should the architect choose?
Correct answer: B - Cloud Spanner with a multi-region configuration
A team is deploying a stateless image-thumbnail microservice packaged as a container. Traffic is highly unpredictable: it is often idle for hours, then spikes sharply. The business wants to pay nothing when the service is not handling requests and to avoid managing any servers or clusters. Which compute platform BEST fits these requirements?
Correct answer: C - Cloud Run, which scales to zero when idle
A media company keeps compliance archives in Cloud Storage. The data must be retained for seven years, is expected to be accessed at most once a year (only for audits), but must still be retrievable within milliseconds when needed. The company wants the lowest possible storage cost. Which storage class should be applied?
Correct answer: D - Archive storage
A connected-vehicle platform ingests several million telemetry events per second from sensors worldwide and must serve low-latency single-key lookups of the most recent readings. The access pattern is simple key-based reads and writes at massive scale - no complex joins or ad-hoc SQL are needed on this store. Which database is the MOST appropriate primary store for this workload?
Correct answer: C - Cloud Bigtable, a wide-column NoSQL store
A healthcare SaaS provider is moving its recently containerized, customer-facing applications to Google Cloud. A stated business requirement is a minimum of 99.9% availability for these applications. The architect wants managed Kubernetes while ensuring the workload survives the loss of a single zone. Which deployment approach BEST meets the availability requirement?
Correct answer: D - Deploy a regional GKE cluster with nodes distributed across multiple zones
An enterprise needs to connect its on-premises data center to Google Cloud. Requirements: a dedicated, private, low-latency link with 10 Gbps of guaranteed bandwidth that does NOT traverse the public internet, and the company already has equipment in a Google colocation facility. Which connectivity option BEST satisfies these requirements?
Correct answer: A - Dedicated Interconnect with a cross-connect
A company hosts a single web application serving users across North America, Europe, and Asia. It wants one anycast IP address, automatic routing of each user to the nearest healthy backend, HTTP(S) path-based routing, and automatic failover across regions. Which load balancer should the architect select?
Correct answer: C - A global external Application Load Balancer
A data team runs nightly batch rendering jobs that are fault-tolerant: any interrupted task is automatically retried and re-queued, and the jobs have no fixed completion deadline. The team wants to minimize compute cost as aggressively as possible. Which Compute Engine option is the BEST fit?
Correct answer: B - Spot VMs, priced for interruptible work
A retailer wants to automatically flag user-uploaded product photos that contain adult or violent content before they are published. The team has no machine-learning specialists and wants to add this capability with the least development effort by calling a managed API. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
Correct answer: A - Cloud Vision API
A contractor needs to read the objects in exactly one Cloud Storage bucket for a two-week engagement and must not be able to see or touch any other resource in the project. Following the principle of least privilege, what should the architect do?
Correct answer: C - Grant the contractor a predefined Storage Object Viewer role on that specific bucket
The PCA exam also covers these domains. Drill them in the full free practice test:
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