Question

Difficulty: MediumSelecting and Designing Compute and Application Platforms

A retail organization is migrating a stateless, containerized REST API microservice to Google Cloud. The microservice experiences unpredictable traffic bursts during flash sales but remains completely idle during off-peak hours. The DevOps team has strict instructions to minimize operational overhead, eliminate baseline cluster management costs, and ensure automatic scaling down to zero instances when idle. Which Google Cloud compute platform should the cloud architect recommend for this workload?

  1. Deploy the containerized service on Cloud Run.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the containerized service on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster.
  3. C
    Deploy the service on Compute Engine instances and purchase 3-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for all virtual machines to handle peak load.
  4. D
    Deploy the service on a Compute Engine Managed Instance Group (MIG) configured to autoscale exclusively on high CPU utilization metrics.

Answer

Deploying the containerized service on Cloud Run is the optimal recommendation because it offers serverless operation, seamless scale-to-zero capability, pay-per-use billing, and eliminates infrastructure management overhead.
Deploying the service on Cloud Run fulfills all functional and operational constraints. It natively runs stateless container images, manages TLS/HTTPS endpoints out of the box, scales dynamically based on incoming HTTP requests, automatically scales to zero instances when idle to eliminate unnecessary costs, and requires no cluster administration.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload requirements
The application is stateless, containerized, experiences bursty traffic, stays idle off-peak, and requires minimal operational overhead and zero baseline cost.
Matching technical and business constraints narrows the suitable compute platforms on GCP.
2
Evaluate GCP compute options against constraints
Cloud Run supports containerized deployment, scales down to zero, incurs no cost when idle, and requires no cluster management.
Cloud Run provides fully managed serverless container execution perfectly tailored to stateless HTTP workloads.

Key Concept

Selecting serverless compute platforms (Cloud Run) versus Kubernetes or virtual machine infrastructure based on workload statefulness, operational overhead limits, and scale-to-zero requirements.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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