Question

Difficulty: MediumSelecting and Designing Storage and Database Resources

A regional online grocery delivery service in North America is architecting a relational database for managing customer order fulfillments. The application operates entirely within one Google Cloud region, requires standard ANSI SQL support with ACID guarantees, and has a storage footprint projected at 300 GB. The infrastructure team wants a fully managed database solution that minimizes operational overhead and cost while providing regional automated failover. Which database strategy best satisfies these requirements?

  1. Deploy a Cloud SQL instance with a regional high-availability configuration across two zones.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy a Cloud Spanner instance configured with multi-region replication to guarantee high availability and relational integrity.
  3. C
    Configure a Cloud SQL instance encrypted with Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK) managed on-premises to meet platform encryption standards.
  4. D
    Deploy a Cloud Bigtable instance for the fulfillment data, relying strictly on IAM roles to prevent unauthorized data exfiltration.

Answer

The optimal architecture is to deploy a Cloud SQL instance with a regional high-availability configuration across two zones.
For a single-region relational database workload under 1 TB requiring standard ANSI SQL and high availability, Cloud SQL configured with regional HA provides automated zonal failover, full ACID compliance, and minimal operational overhead at a significantly lower cost than Cloud Spanner.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the database workload data model and scale requirements.
The application requires ANSI SQL compliance, ACID transactions, and has a 300 GB footprint confined to a single region.
Relational databases under a few terabytes operating in a single region map directly to Cloud SQL rather than horizontally scaled NoSQL or global relational engines.
2
Evaluate the availability and operational constraints.
Automated failover within the region is required while minimizing operational cost.
Cloud SQL regional High Availability (HA) provisions a primary instance and a synchronous standby instance in a secondary zone within the same region, providing automatic failover.
3
Select the service that meets all technical constraints at lowest cost/complexity.
Cloud SQL with regional HA satisfies all constraints without over-provisioning global infrastructure.
Cloud Spanner provides global scale at significantly higher cost, which is unneeded for single-region relational workloads.

Key Concept

Selecting Cloud SQL vs. Cloud Spanner based on global availability needs, data size, and architectural complexity.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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