Question

Difficulty: MediumPlanning and Assessing Cloud Compute Solutions

A digital health enterprise is designing a compute architecture to process incoming HTTP webhooks containing patient telemetry. The application is packaged as a custom container image requiring specific system-level C++ binaries. Traffic is highly unpredictable, spiking during daytime hours and dropping to zero overnight. The organization requires a solution with zero infrastructure management overhead that automatically scales to zero instances when idle to minimize costs. Which Google Cloud compute solution best satisfies these requirements?

  1. Deploy the application using Cloud Run.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the application as a Cloud Functions function.
  3. C
    Deploy the container on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard cluster with a node auto-provisioning pool.
  4. D
    Deploy the application on a Compute Engine Managed Instance Group composed of Spot VMs.

Answer

Deploying the application using Cloud Run is the optimal solution because it supports custom container images with specialized system dependencies, requires zero server administration, and scales down to zero when no webhooks are received.
Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless compute platform that automatically scales HTTP webhooks from zero to handle unpredictable traffic spikes without requiring node management or cluster maintenance. Because it runs standard container images, it accommodates custom OS-level binaries and C++ libraries while ensuring costs are only incurred during active request processing.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload packaging and dependency requirements.
The application requires custom Linux system libraries packaged inside a container image.
Standard serverless function platforms without full container runtime support cannot accommodate custom system C++ libraries easily.
2
Evaluate scaling behavior and infrastructure management constraints.
The workload must scale to zero instances overnight and demand zero operational management.
Virtual machine pools and GKE Standard clusters require infrastructure management and maintain minimum node resources that incur costs even when idle.
3
Select the matching serverless container execution platform.
Cloud Run meets all criteria: full container customizability, fully managed infrastructure, and scale-to-zero HTTP scaling.
Cloud Run allows container execution while eliminating cluster node maintenance and billing when no traffic is present.

Key Concept

Selecting serverless compute platforms based on workload packaging, scaling behavior, and operational overhead.
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