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Difficulty: MediumEstimating GCP Costs with the Pricing Calculator

A cloud engineer is tasked with using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate monthly infrastructure expenses for two upcoming workloads: a fault-tolerant, stateless batch job pipeline that can tolerate sudden instance terminations, and a long-term compliance archive where exported files are stored for several years and accessed less than once a year. Which combination of service configurations in the Pricing Calculator provides the most accurate and cost-effective estimate for these requirements?

  1. Configure Compute Engine using Spot VMs for the batch processing workload, and select Archive Storage for the compliance file backups.Answer
  2. B
    Configure Compute Engine using standard On-Demand VMs with 3-year Committed Use Discounts for the batch processing workload, and select Coldline Storage for the compliance file backups.
  3. C
    Configure Compute Engine using Spot VMs for the batch processing workload, but select Coldline Storage to prevent daily data retrieval penalty fees for the compliance backups.
  4. D
    Configure GKE Autopilot nodes for the batch processing workload and manually add Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs) on top of 3-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) in the calculator.

Answer

Configure Compute Engine using Spot VMs for the batch processing workload, and select Archive Storage for the compliance file backups.
The combination of Spot VMs and Archive Storage represents the correct choice. Spot instances offer deep discounts for stateless, fault-tolerant batch workloads, while Archive Storage minimizes storage costs for data accessed less than once a year.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload fault tolerance and cost optimization model for compute resources.
Stateless, interruption-tolerant batch workloads are best estimated using Spot VMs to achieve maximum pricing discounts.
Spot VMs leverage spare compute capacity at discounted rates and are ideal for workloads that can handle instance preemption.
2
Determine appropriate Cloud Storage class based on access frequency.
Data stored for multi-year compliance and accessed less than once a year maps directly to Archive Storage.
Archive Storage provides the lowest at-rest storage pricing for long-term retention requirements.
3
Select the combined configuration options in the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator.
Combining Spot VMs and Archive Storage provides the most accurate and optimized cost baseline.
This alignment matches GCP architectural best practices for both compute efficiency and storage lifecycle management.

Key Concept

Selecting optimal compute provision models (Spot VMs) and storage tiers (Archive Storage) in the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator based on workload characteristics.
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Estimating GCP Costs with the Pricing Calculator

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