Question

Difficulty: EasyDesigning Infrastructure for Technical Requirements and High Availability

A enterprise team needs to host a standard relational database on Google Cloud for an internal application. The workload requires high availability within a single GCP region with automatic zonal failover, but it has modest traffic and does not require global horizontal scaling or multi-region replication. Which infrastructure solution should you choose to meet these high availability requirements with minimal operational overhead?

  1. Cloud SQL configured with regional high availability (HA) using automatic zonal failoverAnswer
  2. B
    Cloud Spanner configured as a regional instance with multi-zone replication
  3. C
    Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) running a self-managed relational database in a multi-zone StatefulSet
  4. D
    Compute Engine single virtual machine instance with automated Cloud Storage snapshots replicated over HA VPN

Answer

Cloud SQL configured with regional high availability (HA) using automatic zonal failover is the optimal solution.
Cloud SQL regional high availability (HA) provides fully managed primary and standby database instances deployed in separate availability zones within the same region. Synchronous data replication ensures zero-data-loss failover without manual intervention or managing infrastructure.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze high availability requirements
The requirement mandates regional high availability with automatic failover across zones for a standard relational database.
Single-zone or snapshot-based recovery cannot satisfy low Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) without downtime.
2
Evaluate managed database service options
Cloud SQL provides built-in regional HA with a primary and standby instance in separate zones and automatic synchronous replication.
Choosing a fully managed solution eliminates operational overhead while fulfilling standard relational database constraints.
3
Eliminate over-engineered alternatives
Cloud Spanner and GKE custom StatefulSets are over-engineered for modest regional relational workloads.
Spanner adds high costs aimed at global scale, while GKE adds unnecessary management complexity.

Key Concept

Selecting managed cloud database services with regional High Availability (HA) failover
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