Question

Difficulty: EasyDesigning Infrastructure for Technical Requirements and High Availability

An organization is deploying a stateless web application on Compute Engine in Google Cloud. The application must maintain high availability within a single region and automatically tolerate the failure of an individual zone. Which two configuration choices should you implement to meet these high availability requirements?

  1. Configure a regional Managed Instance Group (MIG) to automatically distribute compute instances across multiple availability zones.Answer
  2. Deploy a Regional External Application Load Balancer to distribute incoming traffic across instances in all active backend zones.Answer
  3. C
    Migrate the stateless application to a multi-cluster Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environment with Anthos Service Mesh across multiple regions.
  4. D
    Configure the load balancer HTTP health check to execute complex database queries against the backend relational database.
  5. E
    Use single-zone unmanaged instance groups and rely on scheduled disk snapshots to manually recreate instances during an outage.

Answer

To achieve high availability against zonal outages for a stateless Compute Engine application within a single region, you should configure a regional Managed Instance Group (MIG) across multiple zones and front the instances with a Regional External Application Load Balancer.
Regional Managed Instance Groups automatically maintain compute capacity across multiple availability zones within a Google Cloud region. Pairing regional MIGs with a Regional External Application Load Balancer ensures traffic is seamlessly directed to healthy instances across active zones, providing high availability and protection against zonal outages.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify compute distribution mechanism for regional high availability.
Selecting a regional Managed Instance Group (MIG) spreads instances automatically across zones within a single region.
Single-zone or unmanaged instance groups leave the workload vulnerable to zonal failures.
2
Identify regional load balancing mechanism for traffic routing.
Selecting a Regional External Application Load Balancer distributes HTTP requests evenly across healthy backend instances in all assigned zones.
Load balancing provides automated health probe detection and traffic rerouting away from failing instances or zones.

Key Concept

Designing single-region high availability using regional Managed Instance Groups and Regional Load Balancers
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