Question

Difficulty: MediumSelecting and Designing Storage and Database Resources

A financial software provider is designing a new regional order-processing database on Google Cloud. The system requires standard SQL compliance, ACID transactional guarantees, and high availability across multiple zones within a single GCP region. The access patterns are typical operational OLTP queries, and the architecture team explicitly wants to avoid paying for unneeded multi-region global replication while keeping operational complexity low. Which Google Cloud database architecture should the cloud architect recommend?

  1. Deploy Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL configured with High Availability (regional failover instance in a secondary zone).Answer
  2. B
    Provision a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance with global synchronous replication.
  3. C
    Store transaction records in Cloud Storage dual-region buckets encrypted with Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK) and query them using BigQuery.
  4. D
    Deploy a self-managed PostgreSQL cluster on Compute Engine relying exclusively on IAM roles to prevent unauthorized data exfiltration.

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL configured with High Availability (regional failover instance in a secondary zone) is the optimal choice.
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with High Availability (HA) enabled provides automatic zonal failover within a single GCP region, full ACID transactional compliance, and standard SQL support without the high costs of multi-region database infrastructure.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze workload requirements
Workload needs standard SQL, ACID compliance, low-latency OLTP, single-region deployment, and zonal high availability.
Matching access patterns and geographical scope narrows down the viable GCP database options.
2
Evaluate Cloud SQL against requirements
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL HA provides synchronous replication to a standby instance in a secondary zone within the same region, offering automatic failover and fully managed relational features.
Cloud SQL delivers regional HA at a cost-effective tier suitable for standard OLTP applications.
3
Eliminate over-provisioned and unsuitable services
Cloud Spanner is over-provisioned for single-region needs, BigQuery is an analytical store rather than an OLTP engine, and self-hosted databases increase operational burden.
Architectural best practice dictates choosing managed services that meet technical requirements without unnecessary cost.

Key Concept

Selecting Cloud Database Services Based on Scale, Consistency, and Region Scope
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