Question

Difficulty: HardManaging Compute Engine Resources

An enterprise data engineering team processes nightly batch data pipelines that are fault-tolerant and save progress checkpoints to a Cloud Storage bucket every 10 minutes. The engineering manager needs to optimize compute costs for this workload while delegating operational tasks—such as starting, stopping, and reconfiguring these Compute Engine VM instances—to a specialized operations team following Google Cloud security best practices. Which TWO actions should the cloud engineer take to meet these requirements? (Select 2 answers.)

  1. Provision Compute Engine virtual machines using the Spot VM provisioning model to run the batch processing tasks.Answer
  2. Grant the operations team the predefined Compute Instance Admin (v1) role (roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1) on the project.Answer
  3. C
    Provision standard persistent On-Demand VM instances because Spot VMs cannot write persistent checkpoint data to Cloud Storage buckets.
  4. D
    Assign the primitive Editor role (roles/editor) to the operations team to ensure they have sufficient permissions to modify instance settings.
  5. E
    Automate the creation of a new Google Cloud project when region CPU capacity limits are met to bypass quota restrictions without manual intervention.

Answer

The cloud engineer should provision Compute Engine virtual machines using the Spot VM provisioning model and grant the operations team the predefined Compute Instance Admin (v1) role (roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1).
Utilizing Spot VMs is Google Cloud's recommended strategy for batch and fault-tolerant workloads that checkpoint progress, yielding maximum cost efficiency. Additionally, delegating VM management via the predefined `roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1` role adheres strictly to the principle of least privilege while providing all required Compute Engine operational capabilities.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload fault tolerance and cost requirements
Identified that the batch workload is checkpointed every 10 minutes to Cloud Storage, making it fully resilient to VM preemptions.
Spot VMs provide significant cost reductions (60-91% discount) for fault-tolerant and stateless/checkpointed workloads.
2
Evaluate IAM access management requirements
Determined that the operations team requires start, stop, and reconfiguration capabilities for Compute Engine instances.
The predefined role `roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1` provides full administrative access over Compute Engine instances without granting project-wide primitive Editor access.
3
Reject non-compliant architectural choices
Eliminated options advocating standard On-Demand instances, primitive Editor roles, and project duplication for quota bypassing.
These alternatives violate cost optimization guidelines, least privilege security practices, and GCP quota management standards.

Key Concept

Managing Compute Engine resource cost optimization with Spot VMs and securing lifecycle access using IAM predefined roles.
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