GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Your company is migrating an internal accounting system that runs on a pair of Compute Engine VMs behind a regional load balancer. The application writes critical data to both the boot disk and an attached data disk. The business requires zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) within the region and the ability to continue serving traffic automatically if a single zone becomes unavailable. Operational overhead must be kept to a minimum. Which storage configuration for the VM disks best satisfies these requirements?

Provision Hyperdisk Extreme volumes in each zone and rely on the application's database replication to keep data in sync.
Use Zonal Persistent Disks and configure an automated snapshot schedule that replicates snapshots to a second zone.
Attach Regional Persistent Disks for both the boot volume and the application data volume on each VM.
Attach RAID-0 arrays of Local SSDs in each zone to maximize throughput, backed up nightly to Cloud Storage.

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Answer Description

Regional Persistent Disks synchronously replicate each block write to two separate zones in the same region. This provides an RPO of zero because no acknowledged write can be lost even if an entire zone fails, and the surviving zone's replica disk can be attached to replacement VMs automatically. The service is managed by Google Cloud, so no additional replication software or snapshot orchestration is needed.

Zonal Persistent Disks with scheduled snapshots still risk data loss between snapshots and require manual failover. Hyperdisk Extreme provides high performance but only within a single zone, so it does not survive a zonal outage. Local SSDs offer very low-latency storage but are ephemeral and confined to one host, making them unsuitable for durability or cross-zone availability. Therefore, Regional Persistent Disks are the only option that meets both the zero-RPO and low-operations requirements.

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