Free Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam Questions and Answers

The short answer

The Google Professional Cloud Architect exam is about 50-60 questions in 120 minutes, and Google does not publish a numeric pass mark - the result is simply pass or fail. It is also the only one of these exams with case studies: you study fictional companies in advance and several questions are set inside them. The questions below come from our 720-question PCA bank, with answers and explanations.

Your legacy application requires Windows Server 2008 R2. GCP doesn't support direct migration of this OS version as a supported platform. What should you do?

• ✓ Migrate with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and run on Sole Tenant Nodes.
• ○ The migration is impossible.
• ○ Upgrade OS before migration.
• ○ Use Linux only.

You are designing a high-traffic web application. You want to ensure that if a single zone fails, the application remains available with no downtime. You also want to minimize latency for global users. Which Load Balancer configuration is best?

• ○ Regional External Application Load Balancer.
• ✓ Global External Application Load Balancer with backends in multiple regions.
• ○ Network Load Balancer with backends in a single zone.
• ○ DNS-based Round Robin.

You have multiple GCP projects with similar resource quotas. Requesting quota increases for each project individually is time-consuming. What simplifies this?

• ✓ Create a shared VPC with centrally managed quotas, or use organization-level quota policies.
• ○ Request quotas for each project individually.
• ○ Don't use quotas.
• ○ Quotas cannot be managed centrally.

You're migrating a legacy application with hardcoded IP addresses. Changing the code is not immediately possible. What temporary solution enables migration?

• ✓ Reserve matching static IPs in GCP VPC and update firewall/routing appropriately.
• ○ IP changes require code changes.
• ○ Migration is impossible.
• ○ Use dynamic IPs.

Your BigQuery table has 10TB of data with queries frequently filtering by date. Most queries scan the entire table. What optimization reduces query costs by 90%?

• ✓ Partition the table by date and ensure queries include partition filter.
• ○ Add more columns to the table.
• ○ Use larger machine types.
• ○ Increase slot reservation.

Network egress costs from your GCP environment to the internet are high. Which TWO strategies reduce egress costs?

• ✓ Use Cloud CDN to cache content at Google's edge, reducing origin egress.
• ✓ Compress data before sending over the network.
• ○ Increase bandwidth usage.
• ○ Use Premium Tier networking for all traffic.
• ○ Send more data over the internet.

You're building a cost-aware culture in your engineering team. Which TWO practices help?

• ✓ Include cloud costs in performance reviews and project planning.
• ✓ Share cost dashboards with all teams regularly.
• ○ Hide costs from developers.
• ○ Give unlimited budgets with no visibility.
• ○ Blame developers for all overages.

Which TWO metrics are most critical to monitor for a Cloud Spanner instance to ensure it scales correctly before hitting limits?

• ✓ CPU Utilization (High Importance).
• ✓ Storage Utilization.
• ○ Disk I/O.
• ○ Network Ingress.
• ○ Memory Usage.

Which TWO protocols are supported by the Global External Proxy Network Load Balancer?

• ✓ TCP.
• ✓ UDP (Yes, now supported in proxy NLB).
• ○ HTTP.
• ○ ICMP.
• ○ ESP.

You're planning a database migration to Cloud SQL. Which TWO factors should you evaluate during the assessment phase?

• ✓ Source database version and feature compatibility.
• ✓ Current workload patterns and peak usage times.
• ○ The color of the server rack.
• ○ Office location of database administrators.
• ○ Day of the week for migration.

You are building a semantic search engine. You have generated Embeddings for 1 million documents. You need to perform similarity search (Nearest Neighbor) on these embeddings with low latency. What service do you use?

• ✓ Vertex AI Vector Search (Matching Engine).
• ○ BigQuery Search Index.
• ○ Cloud Spanner.
• ○ Datastore.

Your Dataflow job writes to BigQuery. During traffic spikes, you see quota errors. What should you configure?

• ✓ Use BigQuery Storage Write API with streaming inserts quotas increased.
• ○ Reduce write frequency.
• ○ Use a different destination.
• ○ Quotas cannot be increased.

You are analyzing Cloud Audit Logs. You see an entry `protoPayload.methodName: "google.iam.admin.v1.SetIamPolicy"`. What happened?

• ✓ A user changed permissions (policy) on a resource.
• ○ A user logged in.
• ○ A user deleted a VM.
• ○ A service account key was created.

Your video analysis application needs to process 2-hour videos. What's the recommended approach with Gemini?

• ✓ Use Gemini's long-context video processing with appropriate token limits.
• ○ Only short clips are supported.
• ○ Convert to audio only.
• ○ Video analysis isn't available.

You need to migrate an on-premises Hadoop cluster to GCP. The cluster runs batch jobs daily. What's the recommended target service?

• ✓ Dataproc for managed Hadoop/Spark with ephemeral clusters for batch jobs.
• ○ Compute Engine VMs with manual Hadoop installation.
• ○ Cloud Functions.
• ○ Cloud Run.

You are tasked with backing up an existing localized (zonal) Persistent Disk (500GB) to a different region for disaster recovery. What are the correct steps?

• ✓ Create a Snapshot of the disk.
• ✓ Configure the Snapshot to be stored in the destination region (or multi-region).
• ○ Copy the disk bytes using `dd` over VPN.
• ○ Create a Machine Image.
• ○ Snapshots are global by default, no configuration needed.

Your MySQL database migration should have a fallback option. What approach provides this safety?

• ✓ Maintain bidirectional replication during migration window; can failback to source if needed.
• ○ Delete source immediately after migration.
• ○ Fallback isn't possible.
• ○ Hope for the best.

You want to automate the deployment of your infrastructure using Terraform. You need to store the Terraform state file securely and enable locking to prevent concurrent modifications. Which TWO steps are correct?

• ✓ Use a Cloud Storage bucket as the backend.
• ✓ Enable Object Versioning on the bucket.
• ○ Use a local file committed to Git.
• ○ Use Cloud SQL as the backend.
• ○ Terraform locking is not supported on GCA.

You're analyzing Cloud Storage costs and notice high retrieval charges from Coldline storage. Which TWO actions optimize costs?

• ✓ Move frequently accessed data back to Standard or Nearline storage classes.
• ✓ Implement caching to reduce repeated retrievals of the same data.
• ○ Access the data more often to justify the retrieval costs.
• ○ Delete all data immediately.
• ○ Upgrade to Archive storage.

Your Spanner database latency increased after adding a new index. How do you investigate?

• ✓ Use Query Insights and execution plans to see if the index is being used efficiently or causing hot spots.
• ○ Remove all indexes.
• ○ Increase Spanner nodes.
• ○ Indexes always improve performance.

Ready to test yourself under exam conditions?

720 questions across 12 timed mock exams, domain-wise drills, and the same scaled scoring as the real thing. Free, no signup.

Related Google Cloud PCA guides

All GCP PCA study guides 12 free GCP PCA mock exams Is the GCP PCA exam hard?