GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

A bioinformatics team migrates a genome-analysis workflow from an on-premises HPC cluster to Google Cloud. The workflow runs on a GKE Standard cluster with hundreds of parallel Pods that stream many small files (hundreds of KB) and occasionally write large result files (several GB). The application libraries require a POSIX-compliant shared file system that can scale to multiple tens of terabytes of data and deliver tens of thousands of IOPS during the fan-out phase. The company wants a managed service so that engineers are not responsible for patching or building NFS servers. Which Google Cloud storage solution best satisfies the functional and operational requirements while keeping the architecture as simple as possible?

Cloud Storage bucket mounted via gcsfuse in each Pod
Zonal Persistent Disk with multi-writer attached to all nodes
Compute Engine VM acting as an NFS server backed by regional SSD Persistent Disks
Filestore High Scale SSD instance mounted by the GKE nodes

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Answer Description

Filestore High Scale SSD is a fully managed NFS service, so the operations team does not need to deploy or maintain their own file-server VMs. Compared with Basic tiers, High Scale is designed for HPC and media workloads that need high parallel throughput and hundreds of thousands of IOPS, and it supports single instances up to hundreds of terabytes-large enough for the data set described. Cloud Storage FUSE provides POSIX-like semantics but is object storage under the hood and cannot deliver the low-latency, high-IOPS characteristics required. Persistent Disk multi-writer gives a block device, not a shared file system, and still needs you to run and manage a file-server application on a VM. Deploying an NFS server on Compute Engine with regional SSDs meets the POSIX need but contradicts the "managed service, no patching" requirement and adds complexity.

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