Exercise 1: Why the HA Standby Cannot Absorb Read Traffic — Possible Solution
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The Cloud SQL high-availability standby instance exists purely for
failover, not for serving traffic. It stays in continuous sync with
the primary via synchronous replication so it can take over instantly
if the primary fails, but it is not exposed for real client read
queries at any point while the primary is healthy.

To spread read traffic across additional instances, the team needs a
separate, purpose-built feature: a real Cloud SQL read replica. Read
replicas are distinct from the HA standby - they exist specifically
to serve read-only queries, and a Cloud SQL instance can have both an
HA standby (for failover) and one or more read replicas (for read
scaling) configured at the same time, each doing a different job.

ANSWER: Routing read traffic to the HA standby will not work because
the standby exists solely for failover and does not serve read
queries. The team should instead configure one or more Cloud SQL read
replicas, a separate feature specifically designed to absorb real
read traffic.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This correctly identifies the real, stated limitation of the HA
standby and points to the specific, separate feature (read replicas)
that actually solves the team's stated problem, matching the same
HA-vs-read-replica distinction already established for AWS RDS and
Azure SQL Database.