GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

You are deploying a new stateless checkout API container image to an existing GKE Standard cluster that already hosts several internal microservices. Requirements are:

The API must be reachable only by other workloads inside the cluster.
A minimum of 2 replicas must be running at all times and the workload must automatically scale up to 10 replicas whenever the average CPU utilization across pods exceeds 70 %.
You want to avoid creating any external or internal load-balancer resources that would add cost and management overhead.

Which set of Kubernetes resources best satisfies these requirements?

Create a Deployment with 2 replicas and expose it using a Service of type NodePort; restrict access with additional VPC firewall rules.
Create a Deployment with 2 replicas and expose it using a Service of type LoadBalancer annotated for an internal load balancer; rely on the Deployment's rolling-update strategy for scaling.
Create a Deployment initially set to 2 replicas, an HPA targeting the Deployment with minReplicas 2, maxReplicas 10, and 70 % CPU threshold, and expose it with a Service of type ClusterIP.
Create a StatefulSet with 2 replicas, attach an HPA, and expose it through a Service of type NodePort.

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Answer Description

A Deployment lets you declaratively manage a replica set of stateless pods and performs rolling updates. Pairing it with a HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) provides automatic scaling based on metrics such as CPU utilization; you can set minReplicas = 2, maxReplicas = 10, and a 70 % CPU target so at least two pods are always available while still scaling on demand. Exposing the pods with a Service of type ClusterIP makes the endpoint reachable only inside the cluster-no Cloud Load Balancer or node-port is created, eliminating unnecessary cost and configuration effort.

Using a Service of type LoadBalancer (even with an "internal" annotation) would still provision a Google Cloud internal load balancer, which the scenario wants to avoid. A StatefulSet is intended for workloads that need stable identities and storage and is unnecessary for stateless microservices. A Service of type NodePort relies on node IPs and open ports; while it avoids a load balancer, it can expose the service outside the cluster and requires VPC firewall management, increasing operational overhead.

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