Question

Difficulty: MediumSelecting and Designing Compute and Application Platforms

A gaming analytics company is developing a stateless HTTP API to process unpredictable bursts of telemetry data sent via webhooks from mobile clients. The workload experiences periods of complete inactivity during off-peak hours and requires rapid scaling to handle sudden traffic spikes without manual intervention. The development team wants to containerize the application while minimizing operational management and paying only for the compute resources consumed during request execution. Which Google Cloud compute solution should you recommend?

  1. Deploy the containerized service to Cloud Run configured with autoscaling and scale-to-zero enabled.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the application to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler.
  3. C
    Deploy the application on a Compute Engine Managed Instance Group (MIG) with CPU-based autoscaling.
  4. D
    Provision a Compute Engine instance pool backed by 3-year Committed Use Discounts to cover peak capacity.

Answer

Deploy the containerized service to Cloud Run configured with autoscaling and scale-to-zero enabled.
Deploying the service to Cloud Run provides a fully managed serverless environment that runs stateless containers, scales rapidly based on incoming HTTP webhook requests, scales down to zero when idle, and incurs costs only during request execution.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the workload characteristics and operational constraints.
The workload is stateless, containerized, triggered via HTTP/webhooks, experiences unpredictable traffic spikes, and has periods of zero traffic.
Identifying statefulness, protocol, scaling patterns, and management constraints guides compute platform selection.
2
Evaluate Google Cloud compute options against operational overhead and billing requirements.
Cloud Run supports custom container images, scales automatically from zero to thousands of instances, charges only during request processing, and requires zero cluster maintenance.
Cloud Run is the recommended platform for stateless HTTP container workloads needing minimal management.
3
Eliminate suboptimal compute architectures.
GKE adds unnecessary cluster management complexity, MIGs require VM maintenance and static baseline costs, and Committed Use Discounts are inappropriate for idle-heavy variable workloads.
Avoiding compute misallocations ensures optimal cost efficiency and minimal maintenance.

Key Concept

Selecting Serverless Container Platforms for Stateless HTTP Workloads
Estimated Time:1m 30s
Rate this question