Question

Difficulty: EasyDesigning Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization

A healthtech company is migrating an internal administrative tool to Google Cloud. The application requires a standard relational database with SQL transactions for a 50 GB dataset hosted in a single region. Primary business requirements are to minimize operational management overhead and baseline compute costs while providing high availability across zones. Which database solution best meets these requirements?

  1. Cloud SQL configured with high availability (HA) enabled across two zones in the target regionAnswer
  2. B
    Cloud Spanner provisioned with a regional instance configuration across multiple availability zones
  3. C
    Compute Engine virtual machines running self-managed PostgreSQL with 3-year committed use discounts
  4. D
    Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster running a stateful PostgreSQL container with persistent disks

Answer

Cloud SQL configured with high availability (HA) enabled across two zones in the target region is the optimal choice.
Cloud SQL offers a fully managed relational database service ideal for single-region workloads up to several terabytes. Enabling high availability (HA) provides automatic cross-zone failover while keeping operational overhead low and maintaining cost efficiency for a 50 GB database.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload relational requirements and dataset scale
The application requires a standard SQL relational database for a modest 50 GB dataset in a single region.
Determining scale prevents selecting globally distributed database services designed for petabyte scale.
2
Evaluate business constraints regarding cost and operational overhead
Fully managed Cloud SQL minimizes operational burden (backups, maintenance, failover) at a low baseline cost compared to Cloud Spanner or custom GKE/Compute Engine deployments.
Choosing a fully managed regional database service matches the business goal of low cost and low management effort.

Key Concept

Selecting Cloud SQL over Cloud Spanner or self-managed database infrastructure for small-to-medium regional relational workloads minimizes cost and operational overhead.
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