Explore key concepts in designing robust cloud architectures with this quiz based on real-world enterprise scenarios, best practices, and GCP solution patterns. Enhance your understanding of scalable, secure, and efficient cloud deployments using familiar terms and practical examples.
A multinational retail application needs to distribute incoming user traffic globally while maintaining high availability and low latency. Which architectural pattern best supports this requirement?
Explanation: Multi-region load balancing with distributed frontends helps distribute traffic across multiple global locations, providing high availability and reduced latency for users. Single-zone failover limits resilience and does not address latency. A batch processing pipeline is designed for scheduled jobs, not interactive user requests. Direct database access from client devices poses security and performance risks, as it lacks proper abstraction layers.
A media company wants to process petabytes of streaming data in real time for personalized recommendations. Which cloud architectural approach should they choose?
Explanation: Streaming data ingestion with autoscaling pipelines is suited for processing large, continuous data streams in real time. Scheduling ETL jobs daily introduces unacceptable delays for real-time personalization. Storing user events directly in a relational database can overwhelm the system and is not optimized for streaming. Manual sharding is error-prone and lacks scalability for such data volumes.
A healthcare application stores sensitive images and must comply with strict security rules. Which is the most appropriate way to secure cloud storage access in this context?
Explanation: Using least-privilege IAM policies limits access to only those users and services that require it, which is essential for security and compliance. Publicly sharing bucket URLs exposes sensitive data. Allowing uploads from any IP allows unauthorized access. Disabling object versioning does not address access control and also prevents recovery from accidental changes.
An enterprise wants to extend their existing on-premises workloads to the cloud, requiring secure, reliable connectivity with minimal latency. Which connectivity solution is best suited for this hybrid architecture?
Explanation: Dedicated private networking via a direct interconnect provides secure, high-bandwidth, and low-latency connections between on-premises and cloud environments, ideal for enterprise hybrid use cases. VPN tunnels for every client are less scalable and may increase latency. Relying on public IPs and basic firewalls exposes systems to security risks. Transferring files over unsecured protocols lacks both reliability and protection for enterprise data.
A financial services platform requires its data to remain durable and available even during a regional outage. What is the most effective architectural strategy for disaster recovery?
Explanation: Replicating data across multiple regions ensures durability and availability even if a regional outage occurs. Storing data only in one center introduces a single point of failure. Weekly external backups are slow and not suitable for real-time disaster recovery. Disabling automated failover prevents quick response to outages, increasing downtime risk.