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Difficulty: MediumDesigning Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization

A telehealth organization is designing a solution to handle patient document processing and report generation. The document generation service is a stateless HTTP-based microservice that experiences unpredictable, bursty usage with long periods of zero traffic. Reports must be rendered on demand, and generated PDF files must be retained for seven years to comply with health regulations. The files are accessed frequently during the first 30 days after creation, but rarely accessed afterward. The organization wants to minimize operational maintenance and overall cloud expenditure, ensuring costs scale to zero during idle periods. Which architecture best meets these business and cost optimization requirements?

  1. Deploy the microservice on Cloud Run, and store generated PDF reports in a Cloud Storage bucket configured with an Object Lifecycle Management rule to transition objects to Archive Storage after 30 days.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the microservice on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster, and store generated PDF reports in a Cloud Storage bucket with Object Lifecycle Management enabled.
  3. C
    Deploy the microservice on Cloud Run, and store the binary PDF reports directly as BLOB data in a multi-region Cloud Spanner database instance.
  4. D
    Provision a dedicated Compute Engine Instance Group using a 3-year Committed Use Discount (CUD) to host the microservice, and store generated PDF reports in Cloud Storage Standard class.

Answer

Deploy the microservice on Cloud Run, and store generated PDF reports in a Cloud Storage bucket configured with an Object Lifecycle Management rule to transition objects to Archive Storage after 30 days.
Cloud Run provides serverless compute execution that automatically scales down to zero instances during idle periods, ensuring costs are incurred only when HTTP requests are actively processed. Paired with Cloud Storage Object Lifecycle Management, files are stored cost-effectively during their active 30-day window in Standard class and then transitioned to Archive class to fulfill seven-year compliance storage requirements at minimal cost.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze compute tier cost requirements.
Cloud Run is selected because it natively supports stateless HTTP workloads and scales down to zero instances, eliminating cost during zero-traffic idle times.
GKE cluster overhead or fixed VM commitments incur continuous baseline costs regardless of traffic volume.
2
Analyze storage access patterns and retention constraints.
Cloud Storage Standard class satisfies frequent access for the initial 30 days, while an Object Lifecycle Management policy transitioning files to Archive Storage minimizes 7-year retention costs.
Relational databases like Cloud Spanner are inefficient and expensive for storing unstructured binary blobs over long retention periods.

Key Concept

Serverless compute auto-scaling to zero paired with object storage lifecycle tiering for optimal cost governance.
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Designing Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization