GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

You are deploying a fleet of Compute Engine VMs for an internal web service that stores user session data on an attached block device. Each instance runs in the same zone, must retain data if the VM is stopped or restarted, and requires moderate throughput at the lowest possible cost. The service can tolerate a full-zone outage because the application tier is deployed in multiple zones. Which storage option best meets these requirements?

Provision local SSDs on each VM and schedule hourly snapshots to Cloud Storage.
Use a Regional Persistent Disk replicated between two zones in the region.
Attach a Balanced Persistent Disk in the same zone as each VM.
Mount a Filestore Basic tier instance to the VMs using NFS.

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Answer Description

A balanced zonal persistent disk stores data redundantly on multiple devices within the same zone, so the data survives instance restarts or host maintenance events while delivering good performance at a lower cost than Regional Persistent Disks or Hyperdisk Extreme. Local SSDs are ephemeral and lose data when a VM is stopped, making them unsuitable for session persistence. Filestore is a managed NFS file share, not block storage, and incurs higher cost for this use case. Regional Persistent Disks replicate data across two zones, providing higher availability than needed and at a higher price point, so they are not the most cost-efficient choice when the application already handles cross-zone redundancy.

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