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Difficulty: HardSelecting and Designing Storage and Database Resources

A financial technology organization is designing the storage tier for a new regional rewards and redemption service operating exclusively within a single Google Cloud region. The service requires strong ACID transactional consistency, complex SQL join operations across relational schemas, and an automated regional failover mechanism to guarantee high availability. Total data volume is estimated at 1.5 TB with a peak workload of 12,000 IOPS. The lead architect emphasizes minimizing ongoing operational cost and management complexity while fulfilling all technical constraints. Which database architecture should you recommend?

  1. Deploy Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL configured with high availability (regional failover) across two zones within the target region.Answer
  2. B
    Provision a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance spanning three continents to ensure global transaction consistency and unlimited scaling.
  3. C
    Store transactional records as JSON files in Cloud Storage using Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK) and query them via BigQuery external tables.
  4. D
    Deploy a single-zone Cloud SQL instance relying exclusively on primitive IAM Roles to prevent unauthorized data exfiltration.

Answer

Deploy Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL configured with high availability (regional failover) across two zones within the target region.
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with high availability enabled across two zones delivers fully managed ACID-compliant relational storage with automatic zonal failover. For a 1.5 TB single-region workload requiring SQL joins, Cloud SQL meets all functional performance and SLA demands at an optimal cost point.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze core storage requirements
Workload needs relational schema, complex SQL joins, strict ACID compliance, single-region scope, and 1.5 TB capacity at 12,000 IOPS.
Understanding access patterns and data volume determines whether an OLTP relational database, NoSQL engine, or data warehouse is appropriate.
2
Evaluate scale and regional boundary
Because the workload is strictly single-region and under 10 TB, Cloud SQL can easily handle the throughput and storage demands without requiring globally distributed horizontal scaling.
Cloud Spanner is designed for globally distributed, multi-region relational workloads requiring massive scale. For regional workloads, Cloud SQL is significantly more cost-effective and simpler to operate.
3
Select high availability mechanism
Enabling high availability on Cloud SQL creates a primary instance and a standby instance in a separate zone within the same region using regional persistent disk replication.
Regional failover ensures automatic failover to the standby zone in case of a zonal outage, fulfilling the HA SLA requirement.

Key Concept

Choosing Cloud SQL vs Cloud Spanner based on workload scale, geographic distribution, and operational cost.
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Topics

Selecting and Designing Storage and Database Resources