GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Your team built a containerized Go service that processes infrequent but latency-sensitive requests from mobile clients. The container listens on port 8080, reads a few kilobytes from Cloud Storage, performs lightweight computation, and returns a JSON response within 300 ms. Traffic is highly variable: most days the service is idle, but during product launches it must handle thousands of concurrent requests without manual intervention. The operations team wants the following:

The platform must automatically scale down to zero instances when there is no traffic so that you only pay for actual requests.
Developers should deploy with a simple gcloud command and avoid managing servers, clusters, or node patching.
You must be able to keep using the existing container image without rewriting the app.

Which Google Cloud compute option best meets these requirements?

Cloud Run fully managed service
Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot cluster with a Deployment
Compute Engine managed instance group with autoscaling
Cloud Functions second-generation HTTP trigger

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Answer Description

Cloud Run is designed for stateless container workloads that respond to HTTP requests or events. It starts containers on-demand, automatically scales to thousands of concurrent requests when load increases, and scales all the way down to zero when idle, charging only for the resources used during request processing. Deployment is a single gcloud run deploy command, and Google fully manages the underlying infrastructure, eliminating the need to administer servers or Kubernetes clusters. A container image built by the developers can be used without code changes.

Other choices do not simultaneously satisfy all requirements:

Compute Engine requires you to manage VM lifecycles and would continue billing for idle instances.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot removes node management but still incurs per-pod and control-plane charges even when no traffic arrives, and scaling to zero is not automatic for standard Services.
Cloud Functions scales to zero but only supports functions triggered by HTTP or events, not an arbitrary container; you would need to refactor the application into a functions framework.

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