GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

A global ticketing startup will run flash-sale campaigns that drive up to one million HTTPS requests per second from users on every continent for a few minutes at a time. Business leadership requires that the system prevent overselling by keeping ticket inventory strongly consistent worldwide, deliver sub-100 ms response times, remain available even if an entire Google Cloud region fails, and impose minimal day-to-day operations on a five-person engineering team. Which high-level Google Cloud architecture best meets these objectives?

Create large pre-provisioned Compute Engine managed instance groups with preemptible VMs behind a regional TCP load balancer; cache inventory counts in Memorystore and persist them in Cloud Bigtable replicated across two zones.
Deploy Cloud Run services in at least two distant regions, expose them through a global external HTTP(S) load balancer with Cloud Armor and optional Cloud CDN, and store ticket inventory in a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance.
Use App Engine standard environment in one region with automatic scaling, serve static assets via Cloud CDN, and keep inventory in Firestore in Datastore mode with eventual consistency for queries.
Run the workload on a single-region GKE cluster with horizontal pod autoscaling behind a regional external HTTP(S) load balancer, store inventory in a Cloud SQL instance configured for high availability, and protect the service with Cloud Armor.

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Answer Description

To satisfy the requirements:

Global low-latency access and automatic cross-regional failover are provided by a global external HTTP(S) load balancer that can route traffic to multiple back-end regions.
Flash-sale spikes are handled by Cloud Run, whose fully managed, serverless containers scale automatically from zero to thousands of instances with no capacity pre-provisioning.
Google Cloud's global load-balancing edge mitigates large-scale L3/L4 DDoS attacks, while Cloud Armor security policies supply additional Layer 7 filtering for application-level threats.
A multi-region Cloud Spanner instance supplies externally consistent, strongly consistent reads and writes across regions and continues serving during a regional outage.
Both Cloud Run and Cloud Spanner are managed services, minimizing operational overhead.

The remaining designs fail key requirements: a single-region GKE/Cloud SQL deployment cannot survive a regional outage; Compute Engine managed instance groups with Bigtable do not provide global strong consistency and require significant capacity management; App Engine with Firestore in Datastore mode offers only eventual consistency. Therefore, deploying Cloud Run in multiple regions behind a global external HTTP(S) load balancer with Cloud Armor, backed by a multi-region Cloud Spanner database, is the only option that meets all objectives.

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