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Difficulty: MediumDesigning Infrastructure for Technical Requirements and High Availability

A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise is designing the core architecture for its customer analytics portal on Google Cloud. The solution requires multi-regional high availability with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) near zero and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) under 5 seconds. The workload consists of a transactional relational database that demands strong global consistency across regions, alongside a stateless HTTP microservices API layer with fluctuating request volumes. Which TWO architectural decisions should you make to satisfy these technical requirements and high availability targets?

  1. Provision a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance for the transactional relational database layer.Answer
  2. Deploy the stateless microservices on Cloud Run across multiple regions behind a Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with cross-region read replicas to handle multi-region synchronous writes and strong transactional consistency.
  4. D
    Provision a multi-cluster GKE Enterprise deployment with service mesh to host simple stateless HTTP API microservices.
  5. E
    Configure global load balancer health checks to perform deep queries on the backend relational database to verify full system health.

Answer

To meet strict multi-region high availability, near-zero RTO, and sub-5-second RPO with strong relational consistency, the architecture requires Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration for data persistence and Cloud Run deployed across multiple regions behind a Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer for the compute tier.
Cloud Spanner in a multi-region configuration delivers built-in synchronous multi-region replication and strong consistency, directly fulfilling the strict RPO and RPO requirements. Deploying stateless HTTP microservices on Cloud Run across multiple regions behind a Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer provides automatic scaling, low latency traffic distribution, and seamless regional failover without operational cluster management.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate data layer requirements for multi-region high availability and consistency.
Cloud Spanner multi-region provides synchronous replication across regions, ensuring strong consistency and sub-second RPO.
Standard relational services like Cloud SQL rely on asynchronous cross-region replicas which cannot guarantee synchronous multi-region consistency or zero RPO.
2
Evaluate compute layer requirements for stateless microservices under variable demand.
Cloud Run deployed across multiple regions integrated with a Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer automatically scales compute resources based on incoming traffic while providing multi-region failover.
Using serverless Cloud Run eliminates cluster management overhead compared to GKE, while the global load balancer routes traffic to the nearest healthy region.

Key Concept

Designing multi-region highly available architectures using Cloud Spanner for globally consistent relational data and Cloud Run with Global Load Balancing for stateless compute.
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Designing Infrastructure for Technical Requirements and High Availability