Question

Difficulty: HardDesigning Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization

An international retail company is migrating its regional order processing application to Google Cloud. The application relies on a standard relational database with strict ACID transaction requirements, storing 2 TB of data and handling a predictable peak load of 4,000 IOPS. The business requires high availability across zones within a single GCP region, but explicit business constraints require minimizing monthly operational overhead and infrastructure costs. Multi-region redundancy is explicitly out of scope. Which database architecture should you recommend?

  1. Provision Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL configured with High Availability (regional persistent disk replication across two zones).Answer
  2. B
    Provision a Cloud Spanner instance configured for single-region deployment with multiple processing units.
  3. C
    Deploy a PostgreSQL cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using StatefulSets and Persistent Disks across multiple zones.
  4. D
    Deploy Compute Engine Virtual Machines in an unmanaged Instance Group with database replication using primitive Owner IAM roles for service management.

Answer

Provision Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL configured with High Availability (regional persistent disk replication across two zones).
Cloud SQL with High Availability (HA) provides automatic failover across zones in a single region using synchronous disk replication. For a single-region 2 TB relational database with moderate throughput requirements, Cloud SQL is fully managed, meets all availability and performance needs, and minimizes monthly infrastructure costs.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze business and technical requirements
Workload requires relational ACID compliance, 2 TB storage, 4,000 IOPS peak, single-region high availability, minimal operational management, and lowest cost.
Identifying constraints dictates selecting a cost-optimized, fully managed single-region solution rather than multi-region or self-managed infrastructure.
2
Evaluate candidate GCP database offerings
Cloud SQL easily satisfies 2 TB storage and 4,000 IOPS while offering automated HA across zones within a region at a fraction of the cost of horizontally scalable multi-region databases.
Cloud Spanner provides multi-region global consistency and massive horizontal scale, which is unnecessary and far more expensive for a single-region regional RDBMS workload.
3
Select the optimal architectural decision
Recommend Cloud SQL with High Availability.
It achieves regional HA and managed administration while adhering strictly to cost optimization and minimal complexity constraints.

Key Concept

Selecting cost-effective relational database architecture based on regional vs global requirements.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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