GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

A retail company is migrating its stateless Java REST API that can surge from zero to 10 000 requests per second within minutes. The team has little container-orchestration expertise and wants to minimize day-to-day infrastructure management. Finance has imposed a strict monthly compute budget, and latency must stay below 200 ms during traffic peaks. The service must remain available if an entire zone goes down. Which deployment option offers the best balance between cost control, performance, and operational complexity?

Deploy the API on a single-zone GKE Autopilot cluster with Horizontal Pod Autoscaling enabled.
Deploy the API on a single-zone managed instance group of preemptible Compute Engine VMs behind an external HTTP(S) load balancer.
Deploy the API on autoscaled Compute Engine instance groups in two separate regions and manually manage global load balancing.
Deploy the API on Cloud Run as a regional service fronted by an external HTTP(S) load balancer.

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Answer Description

Running the workload on Cloud Run provides request-based billing, so no compute cost is incurred while traffic is idle, directly addressing the hard budget constraint. Cloud Run's automatic, per-request scaling can burst quickly to handle thousands of concurrent requests while maintaining low latency. Because a regional Cloud Run service is automatically replicated across multiple zones, it continues to serve traffic if one zone fails without any cluster or instance management by the team.

A single-zone managed instance group of preemptible VMs is low-cost but fails both the high-availability and latency objectives when preemptions or zonal outages occur. A single-zone GKE Autopilot cluster still introduces Kubernetes administration overhead and lacks multi-zone resilience unless explicitly configured otherwise. Manually managing autoscaled VM groups in two regions meets availability needs but adds significant operational complexity and usually costs more than serverless, pay-per-use Cloud Run for spiky workloads.

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