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Difficulty: MediumDesigning Infrastructure for Technical Requirements and High Availability

A financial technology firm is architecting a regional payment processing application on Google Cloud. The system requires high availability across multiple availability zones within a single GCP region, an Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of under 1 minute, and zero data loss (RPO = 0) for relational transactions. The architecture consists of a stateless HTTP API microservice tier and a relational database tier. The operational team wants to minimize cluster infrastructure management while preventing cascading service outages caused by transient database latency. Which TWO architectural strategies should you implement to fulfill these technical requirements?

  1. Deploy the stateless HTTP microservices on Cloud Run to achieve automatic multi-zone high availability with zero cluster management overhead.Answer
  2. Configure the load balancer health check probe to target a shallow application endpoint that verifies local process responsiveness without querying downstream database dependencies.Answer
  3. C
    Provision a multi-zone Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Enterprise cluster to host the stateless microservice endpoints.
  4. D
    Deploy a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance as the database storage engine for standard regional ACID transaction requirements.
  5. E
    Configure load balancer health check probes to execute a full database read query to guarantee end-to-end database connectivity before routing traffic.

Answer

The correct strategies are deploying the stateless HTTP microservices to Cloud Run for fully managed multi-zone scalability without cluster operational burden, and using shallow load balancer health checks targeting local process health rather than downstream database dependencies.
Deploying stateless microservices to Cloud Run ensures built-in multi-zone high availability and zero infrastructure management. Utilizing a shallow health check probe isolates application instance availability from downstream database latency, protecting the service tier against cascading failures.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Select compute architecture based on operational requirements and service statelessness.
Cloud Run is selected because it delivers multi-zone serverless execution for stateless HTTP APIs without infrastructure management overhead.
GKE adds unnecessary cluster management overhead for simple stateless web microservices.
2
Design load balancer health check policy to avoid cascading failures.
A shallow health check endpoint (such as `/healthz`) is selected.
Deep health checks that hit backend databases mark compute nodes unhealthy during database latency spikes, causing cascading instance removals.

Key Concept

Designing High-Availability Regional Architectures and Health Checking Policies
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Topics

Designing Infrastructure for Technical Requirements and High Availability