Objective 1.2
PCADesigning a cloud solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements
Objective 1.2 sits in Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture, which carries 25% of the Cloud Architect exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Google Cloud page it rests on.
Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Google Cloud exam page ↗
A worked example
Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.
An engineer maps a downtime budget onto Google Cloud building blocks. What availability design goal is published for zonal resources such as a Compute Engine instance and its Persistent Disk?
Correct.
Concept
A published design goal converts a scope choice into a number of hours, which is what makes a downtime budget comparable against an architecture rather than a matter of opinion.
Why D
Zonal resources such as Compute Engine and Persistent Disk carry an availability design goal of 99.9%, which implies 8.75 hours of downtime a year.
Source
Architecting disaster recovery for cloud infrastructure outages, checked August 2026Google Cloud generally designs products to deliver the following levels of availability for zones and regions: Resource Examples Availability design goal Implied downtime Zonal Compute Engine, Persistent Disk 99.9% 8.75 hours / year Regional Regional Cloud Storage, Replicated Persistent Disk, Regional GKE 99.99% 52 minutes / year
Now you: objective 1.2 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
A team choosing between zonal and regional building blocks may lose no more than about an hour of service a year. Which resource scope does Google Cloud design to a 99.99% availability goal?
Sample question 2 of 3
A team expects an application built on one Google Cloud product to be more available than that product itself. Why does the guidance treat that expectation as unreachable?
Sample question 3 of 3
A design runs on Compute Engine VMs with Persistent Disk and has to keep serving through a zone outage. What does that choice oblige the team to build for itself?
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Read the sources
These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.