GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Spot VMs are billed at discounts of up to 91 % compared with on-demand pricing, but they can be preempted at any time. Using a managed instance group of Spot VMs lets Compute Engine automatically recreate any VM that is preempted, so capacity is quickly restored. By defining a custom machine type with 4 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM and an autoscaler that maintains an aggregate 16 vCPUs, you preserve the required total compute while roughly halving per-VM cost in addition to the Spot discount-easily exceeding the 70 % savings target. Keeping the original e2-standard-8 size on Spot VMs would save money but risks throughput loss during preemption because capacity is not automatically recovered. Cloud Run's maximum request timeout is 60 minutes, so it cannot handle a three-hour HPC batch job, and switching to on-demand C2 instances would increase costs instead of reducing them.