GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

An e-commerce company has containerized an image-processing service that uses ImageMagick to create product thumbnails whenever a new image file is written to a Cloud Storage bucket. Upload traffic is unpredictable-some days there are no images, while major sales events trigger thousands of uploads per minute. The team wants to trigger the processing automatically from Cloud Storage events, reuse the existing container without code changes, pay only while requests are handled, and have the service scale from zero to meet sudden spikes. Which Google Cloud managed compute option best meets these requirements while minimizing operational overhead?

Host the container on a GKE Autopilot cluster and configure a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler driven by Pub/Sub messages.
Create a regional managed instance group of pre-emptible Compute Engine VMs that poll the bucket for new objects.
Refactor the code into Cloud Functions (1st generation) with a Cloud Storage trigger.
Deploy the container on Cloud Run and use Eventarc to forward Cloud Storage object-create events to the service.

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Answer Description

Cloud Run is designed to run stateless container images without infrastructure management. It supports any containerized application that listens for HTTP requests, so the existing ImageMagick-based container can be used unchanged. Eventarc can deliver Cloud Storage object-create events to Cloud Run, satisfying the event-driven trigger requirement. Cloud Run automatically scales instances up rapidly in response to traffic and back down to zero when idle, so the company pays only for actual request processing time.

Cloud Functions (1st gen) would require rewriting the service into a supported language runtime and does not allow bringing an arbitrary container image. GKE Autopilot removes some cluster management tasks but still incurs per-pod charges even when idle and does not scale to zero by default. A managed instance group on Compute Engine needs VM administration and keeps instances running, leading to higher idle cost.

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