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Difficulty: HardSelecting and Designing Compute and Application Platforms

A financial services company is modernizing a stateless web microservice that processes incoming webhook events. The microservice receives HTTPS traffic that drops to zero outside of business hours but experiences unpredictable bursts reaching thousands of concurrent requests per second during peak trading events. The application is packaged in a Docker container that requires standard Linux binaries. The operations team has mandated two strict requirements: zero infrastructure management overhead and zero compute cost when there is no incoming traffic. Which Google Cloud compute platform and configuration should you recommend to satisfy these requirements?

  1. Deploy the application container to Cloud Run fully managed, setting the minimum instance count to zero and enabling autoscaling based on concurrent requests.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the application container to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster using a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) configured for CPU utilization.
  3. C
    Deploy the container on a Compute Engine Managed Instance Group (MIG) using a custom VM image and configure scaling policies exclusively on CPU utilization metrics.
  4. D
    Provision a fixed capacity Compute Engine VM cluster sized for peak load and purchase 3-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) to minimize compute unit cost.

Answer

Deploying the containerized application on Cloud Run fully managed with a minimum instance count of zero matches all technical and operational requirements.
Deploying the containerized application on Cloud Run fully managed with a minimum instance count of zero fulfills all constraints. Cloud Run provides serverless container execution for stateless HTTP/HTTPS services, handles request-based autoscaling automatically, requires zero infrastructure or cluster maintenance, and scales to zero instances during idle periods so no compute charges accrue.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate workload characteristics and requirements
The application is stateless, containerized, receives HTTPS webhook traffic, requires rapid autoscaling from 0 to thousands of requests, and requires zero idle cost and zero management overhead.
Identifying key constraints narrows down compute platform choices from IaaS to Serverless PaaS.
2
Compare serverless compute platforms in Google Cloud
Cloud Run runs arbitrary stateless container workloads, scales to zero automatically when idle, handles request-based concurrency scaling without cluster administration, and bills strictly on consumed execution time.
GKE adds cluster/Kubernetes management overhead, while Compute Engine MIGs require VM provisioning and maintenance without scale-to-zero capabilities.
3
Select optimal compute option
Cloud Run fully managed configured with min-instances=0 directly fulfills the zero-overhead and zero-idle-cost mandates.
It avoids compute misallocation like GKE overkill or VM fixed provisioning for stateless containerized web APIs.

Key Concept

Selecting Serverless Compute Platforms (Cloud Run vs. GKE vs. Compute Engine) based on operational overhead, containerization, statelessness, and scale-to-zero requirements.
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Topics

Selecting and Designing Compute and Application Platforms