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Difficulty: MediumPlanning and Assessing Cloud Compute Solutions

A company needs to plan compute resources for a nightly data indexing task on Google Cloud. The task runs once per day for approximately 4 hours, periodically saves checkpoint state to Cloud Storage, and can safely resume without data loss if pre-empted. The primary goal is to minimize compute infrastructure costs. Which compute deployment strategy should the cloud engineer select?

  1. Provision Compute Engine instances utilizing Spot VMs for the batch task execution.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the indexing logic as a Cloud Function triggered nightly by Cloud Scheduler.
  3. C
    Provision standard Compute Engine VMs attached to a 3-year Committed Use Discount contract.
  4. D
    Deploy the workload onto a GKE Autopilot cluster configured as a continuous DaemonSet pod across all nodes.

Answer

Provision Compute Engine instances utilizing Spot VMs for the batch task execution.
Spot VMs provide significant cost savings (60-91% discount) for compute workloads on Compute Engine. Because the workload is a batch process running 4 hours nightly and regularly checkpoints its progress to Cloud Storage, it can withstand VM preemption and resume without data loss.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload characteristics
Workload runs 4 hours nightly, is fault-tolerant with Cloud Storage checkpointing, and seeks minimum cost.
Identifying fault tolerance and runtime duration dictates the appropriate GCP compute model.
2
Evaluate serverless and commitment trade-offs
Cloud Functions time out before 4 hours, while Committed Use Discounts require 24/7 continuous utilization.
Serverless limits and financial commitments rule out standard serverless snippets and long-term commitments for intermittent tasks.
3
Select the optimal compute option
Spot VMs offer maximum cost savings for fault-tolerant Compute Engine workloads.
Since the task handles interruptions gracefully via checkpointing, Spot VMs satisfy all cost and operational constraints.

Key Concept

Planning Compute Engine Workloads using Spot VMs for Ephemeral Fault-Tolerant Tasks
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Planning and Assessing Cloud Compute Solutions

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