Planning for recovery when a pipeline or region fails

Disaster recovery (DR) and fault tolerance for GCP data systems are governed by two key metrics: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Designing for these requires deliberate choices about data replication (multi-region vs. regional), backup strategies, and service redundancy across zones and regions. Google-managed services like BigQuery and Spanner offer built-in high availability, while services like Compute Engine or self-managed databases require explicit architectural decisions for resilience.

Must-know

• RTO measures how quickly a system must recover after a disruption, while RPO measures the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time (e.g., losing 5 minutes of data).
• Multi-region storage (e.g., GCS multi-region, BigQuery multi-region datasets) provides higher availability and durability but may increase cost and write latency compared to regional resources.
• Cloud SQL and Spanner support cross-region read replicas and automated backups; Cloud SQL failover requires configuring a standby instance, whereas Spanner's multi-region configurations provide automatic synchronous replication and failover.
• BigQuery automatically replicates data across zones within a region (and across regions for multi-region datasets) and manages failover transparently, but does not natively support customer-triggered geographic failover for regional datasets without manual dataset copy.
• For Dataflow and other compute-based pipelines, fault tolerance often means designing idempotent, checkpointed, and stateful processing so jobs can resume from failure without data loss or duplication.
• Pub/Sub provides at-least-once delivery with built-in message retention and redelivery, which supports fault-tolerant, decoupled pipeline design, but downstream consumers must handle potential duplicate messages.

Coverage checked against the published exam guide on Aug 11, 2026.

These are independent practice questions, written against this certification's published exam guide. They are not the certification vendor's own questions, and not the real exam.