Google Professional Cloud Database Engineer Question 243
Single answerGoogle Cloud PlatformYour company runs a mission-critical application on Google Cloud using a Cloud Spanner database. To ensure high availability and disaster recovery, the database is configured for multi-region replication. As part of compliance requirements, you need to periodically test the high availability and disaster recovery strategy without causing downtime or data loss. What is the best approach to perform this test?
- A
Trigger a failover to a secondary region in the multi-region configuration and monitor application performance.
- B
Manually shut down the primary region and observe how the system handles the outage.
- C
Simulate a regional outage by disabling network access to the primary region using a testing tool, and validate whether the application remains available.
- D
Take a complete backup of the database, restore it in a new region, and compare data integrity with the primary database.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
Simulating a regional outage using a testing tool effectively tests the high availability and disaster recovery strategy in a controlled environment. It allows you to validate whether the database and application can handle a real-world regional failure without causing disruption, ensuring compliance with high availability requirements. Other options either fail to fully test the system's response to a disaster scenario or introduce unnecessary risks.
- A. Incorrect.
Triggering a failover manually might not fully simulate a real-world disaster scenario, as it does not test the system's ability to autonomously recover from unexpected outages.
- B. Incorrect.
Manually shutting down the primary region introduces significant risks of unexpected downtime or data loss for the application, making it unsuitable for a non-disruptive test.
- C. Correct.
Simulating a regional outage by disabling network access to the primary region closely mimics a real-world disaster scenario and allows you to validate the database's high availability and disaster recovery capabilities without causing actual disruption.
- D. Incorrect.
Restoring a backup to a new region can help verify data integrity but does not effectively test the high availability and disaster recovery strategy in real-time scenarios.