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Difficulty: Very hardDesigning Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization

A financial analytics company is migrating its real-time trade audit platform to Google Cloud. The application experiences a steady, predictable baseline traffic pattern during standard trading hours, but encounters extreme, unpredictable 10x traffic spikes during high-volatility market events. The transactional workload requires single-region relational database capabilities with ACID compliance and High Availability (HA). Regulatory governance mandates that raw audit log files must be stored immutably and rendered tamper-proof for seven years at the lowest possible operational and storage cost. Additionally, leadership requires an operational model that minimizes infrastructure management overhead and total cost of ownership (TCO). Which architectural design should you recommend?

  1. Deploy the application on Cloud Run connected via Serverless VPC Access to a High Availability Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance, enforce long-term audit log retention using Cloud Storage Archive class with a Bucket Lock retention policy, and purchase Flexible Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) to cover baseline compute capacity.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the application on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster, provision a Multi-Region Cloud Spanner instance to handle peak database transactions, and store historical logs in Cloud Storage Standard storage class with Object Versioning enabled.
  3. C
    Deploy the application on Compute Engine Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) using 3-Year Resource-Based Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) provisioned for peak burst capacity (10x baseline), connect to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and maintain historical audit logs in BigQuery Active Storage.
  4. D
    Deploy the application on Cloud Run with Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and implement a cold-standby disaster recovery plan that restores nightly database backups to a secondary region to meet a strict zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirement.

Answer

The optimal architecture deploys Cloud Run connected via Serverless VPC Access to a High Availability Cloud SQL instance, retains historical logs in Cloud Storage Archive class using Bucket Lock retention policies, and applies Flexible Committed Use Discounts for baseline compute cost optimization.
The combination of Cloud Run and Cloud SQL (HA) delivers a low-management, serverless compute model that automatically scales to handle 10x traffic spikes while keeping baseline compute costs minimal using Flexible CUDs. Storing raw logs in Cloud Storage Archive class with Bucket Lock ensures 7-year regulatory WORM compliance at the lowest possible cost per gigabyte.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate compute scaling and FinOps optimization requirements.
Cloud Run provides serverless autoscaling from baseline to 10x traffic spikes with zero baseline overhead when idle. Applying Flexible Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) covers the predictable baseline cost while allowing spot/pay-as-you-go scaling for unpredictable spikes.
Resource-based CUDs provisioned for peak capacity cause severe financial waste during off-peak hours.
2
Select database technology based on locality and relational ACID requirements.
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL in High Availability (regional) mode satisfies single-region relational ACID requirements at a fraction of Cloud Spanner's cost.
Cloud Spanner is designed for horizontally scaled, multi-region or globally distributed workloads and represents an over-engineered, costly choice for single-region relational needs.
3
Align long-term storage and regulatory compliance requirements with Cloud Storage classes.
Cloud Storage Archive class offers the lowest cost tier for long-term (7-year) cold log storage. Bucket Lock enclaves a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) compliance policy to guarantee immutability.
Standard storage tiers and active database storage (BigQuery) incur excessive ongoing storage costs for data that is rarely accessed.

Key Concept

Balancing compute autoscaling, database right-sizing, and storage tiering to optimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while satisfying business availability and regulatory compliance requirements.
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Topics

Designing Infrastructure for Business Requirements and Cost Optimization