Question

Difficulty: MediumDesigning Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization

A financial analytics company is migrating an event processing platform and a historical audit reporting engine to Google Cloud. The infrastructure architecture must satisfy two core business requirements:
1. Store historical audit records cost-effectively while automatically moving older objects to archival storage after 30 days of non-access.
2. Execute a lightweight, stateless webhook microservice that processes infrequent incoming event payloads while eliminating idle compute expenses.

Which TWO architectural choices should you recommend to minimize cost while fulfilling these business requirements?

  1. Store historical audit records in Cloud Storage Standard and implement an Object Lifecycle Management policy to transition objects to Archive Storage after 30 days.Answer
  2. B
    Provision a multi-region Cloud Spanner database instance to store historical audit records for high availability and relational querying.
  3. Deploy the stateless webhook event processing microservice to Cloud Run configured to scale down to zero instances when no traffic is present.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy the stateless webhook event processing microservice on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard cluster with a minimum node pool size of two nodes.

Answer

The optimal recommendations are using Cloud Storage with Object Lifecycle Management to transition data to Archive Storage after 30 days, and deploying the webhook microservice on Cloud Run to scale down to zero when idle.
Combining Cloud Storage Object Lifecycle Management with Cloud Run ensures both business requirements are met with minimal expense. Object Lifecycle Management automates transitions to low-cost archival tiers after 30 days, while Cloud Run scales containers to zero during idle periods to eliminate unnecessary compute spending.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the storage requirement for historical audit records.
Infrequently accessed audit data requires cost-effective object storage with automated tiering. Cloud Storage combined with Object Lifecycle Management transitions objects to Coldline/Archive storage automatically, reducing long-term storage costs.
Meets the 30-day archival rule without incurring unnecessary relational database provisioning charges.
2
Analyze the compute requirement for the intermittent stateless microservice.
Cloud Run allows containerized stateless services to scale to zero instances during idle periods, charging strictly per request execution time.
Eliminates infrastructure cost during periods of no traffic, satisfying the requirement to avoid idle compute costs.

Key Concept

Selecting serverless compute (Cloud Run) and object storage lifecycle rules (Cloud Storage) for cost-optimized cloud architectures.
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