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Difficulty: MediumDesigning Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization

A logistics enterprise operates a fleet management webhook microservice that ingests vehicle telemetry updates. The traffic pattern is highly unpredictable, experiencing long periods of zero activity overnight followed by heavy bursts during morning delivery schedules. The business goal is to minimize operational cost by eliminating baseline compute expenses during idle periods while ensuring automatic scale-out during traffic spikes without managing infrastructure cluster nodes. Which cloud architecture should you recommend?

  1. Deploy the containerized microservice to Cloud Run with the minimum instance count set to zero.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the microservice onto a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster configured with Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA).
  3. C
    Provision a multi-region Cloud Spanner database instance to manage incoming telemetry payloads with high availability.
  4. D
    Provision Compute Engine virtual machines sized for peak traffic and purchase 3-Year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs).

Answer

Deploying the containerized microservice to Cloud Run with minimum instances set to zero achieves the business requirement of zero infrastructure cost during idle periods while providing seamless automated scaling during peak morning workloads.
Deploying to Cloud Run with minimum instances configured to zero satisfies both the operational requirement of automatic request-driven scaling and the business objective of minimizing cost by eliminating all charges during zero-traffic idle periods.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze business and workload requirements
Identified key requirements: unpredictable bursty traffic with long zero-traffic overnight windows, requirement for zero baseline cost when idle, and minimum administrative infrastructure overhead.
Cost optimization requires matching resource provisioning strategy directly with the workload's consumption pattern.
2
Evaluate compute service scaling behaviors
Compute Engine VMs incur fixed hourly costs even when idle. GKE clusters incur baseline cluster node fees. Cloud Run supports scaling down to 0 instances when idle, incurring zero cost.
Cloud Run bills per-second of actual request execution time when min-instances is set to zero.
3
Select optimal architecture
Cloud Run meets all functional performance requirements while strictly optimizing for the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).
Serverless container execution eliminates idle compute costs and node management.

Key Concept

Serverless Compute Right-Sizing and Scale-to-Zero Cost Optimization
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Topics

Designing Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization