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PCA Practice Exam: Professional Cloud Architect

359 questions · 120 min timed mode · Google Cloud · Updated 2026

The flagship GCP cert. Design systems that scale, fail gracefully, and don't bankrupt anyone.

What you'll be tested on

Sample PCA questions

Your company has decided to make a major revision of their API in order to create better experiences for their developers. They need to keep the old version of the API available and deployable, while allowing new customers and testers to try out the new API. They want to keep the same SSL and DNS records in place to serve both APIs. What should they do?
  1. Configure a new load balancer for the new version of the API
  2. Reconfigure old clients to use a new endpoint for the new API
  3. Have the old API forward traffic to the new API based on the path
  4. Use separate backend pools for each API path behind the load balancer
Show answerD — Use separate backend pools for each API path behind the load balancer
The Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer supports URL maps that route requests to different backend services based on the request path, all under a single external IP, SSL certificate, and DNS name. Creating separate backend pools (backend services) for the old and new API versions lets both coexist behind the same frontend, satisfying the requirement to keep SSL and DNS unchanged. A new load balancer would require new IP, SSL, and DNS records. Reconfiguring old clients is disruptive and unnecessary. Having the old API forward traffic adds latency, coupling, and a single point of failure instead of native path-based routing.
Your company plans to migrate a multi-petabyte data set to the cloud. The data set must be available 24hrs a day. Your business analysts have experience only with using a SQL interface. How should you store the data to optimize it for ease of analysis?
  1. Load data into Google BigQuery
  2. Insert data into Google Cloud SQL
  3. Put flat files into Google Cloud Storage
  4. Stream data into Google Cloud Datastore
Show answerA — Load data into Google BigQuery
BigQuery is Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless data warehouse designed for interactive analysis of multi-petabyte datasets using standard SQL, which matches the analysts' existing skills. It scales seamlessly and requires no infrastructure management. Cloud SQL is a relational database for transactional workloads and cannot handle petabyte-scale analytics efficiently. Cloud Storage flat files are cheap storage but provide no SQL query engine on their own and require extra processing. Cloud Datastore is a NoSQL document database for application data, not ad-hoc analytical queries, and does not support a SQL interface.
A news feed web service has the following code running on Google App Engine. import news from flask import Flask, redirect, request from flask.ext.api import status from google.appengine.api import users app = Flask(__name__) sessions = {} @app.route("/") def homepage(): user = users.get_current_user() if not user: return "Invalid login", status.HTTP_401_UNAUTHORIZED if user not in sessions: sessions[user] = {"viewed": []} news_articles = news.get_new_news(user, sessions[user]["viewed"]) sessions[user]["viewed"] += [n["id"] for n in news_articles] return news.render(news_articles) if __name__ == "__main__": app.run() During peak load, users report that they can see news articles they already viewed. What is the most likely cause of this problem?
  1. The session variable is local to just a single instance
  2. The session variable is being overwritten in Cloud Datastore
  3. The URL of the API needs to be modified to prevent caching
  4. The HTTP Expires header needs to be set to -1 stop caching
Show answerA — The session variable is local to just a single instance
App Engine automatically scales by running multiple instances of the application. Session variables stored in instance memory are local to a single instance, so a load-balanced user whose requests hit different instances will see inconsistent session state, such as news articles marked as viewed appearing again. The fix is to externalize sessions to a shared store like Memorystore, Datastore, or cookies. The other options are wrong because the problem is not Datastore overwrites or caching: URL changes and HTTP Expires headers control caching, which is unrelated to session state being lost across instances.

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FAQ

How many practice questions are in this PCA bank?
359 questions covering the current PCA Professional Cloud Architect syllabus, every one with the correct answer and an explanation.
How long is the real PCA exam?
The official PCA exam gives you 120 minutes. Our timed exam mode uses the same limit so the pace feels familiar.
What does PCA access cost?
Plans start at $3.99 for 3 months. One payment, no subscription — and far cheaper than retaking the real exam.