GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Only a regional GKE cluster automatically replicates the control plane across multiple zones in the same region, allowing the API server and etcd datastore to remain available if one zone becomes unavailable. Creating a regional Standard cluster preserves your ability to size and manage node pools yourself while adding high-availability control-plane replicas. The existing zonal cluster cannot be converted in place to Autopilot, and Autopilot would hand over node management to Google, contradicting the requirement to keep self-managed node pools. Enabling surge upgrades or adding extra node pools does not protect the single-zone control plane from an outage. Running three separate zonal clusters with multi-cluster Ingress adds complexity and cost and still leaves each cluster's control plane vulnerable to its zone's failure.