GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

An e-commerce firm ingests 500 GB of application logs into a Cloud Storage bucket in us-central1 every day. Logs must remain in that region for 3 years. Engineers query only the most recent 7 days of logs hourly; older data is accessed a few times per quarter and can take up to 24 hours to retrieve. As the cloud architect, which lifecycle configuration best minimizes total storage costs while meeting these requirements?

Keep logs in Standard for 7 days, then transition to Nearline on day 8, to Coldline on day 31, and delete on day 1095.
Apply a lifecycle rule that moves objects from Standard to Coldline after 7 days, and deletes them after 1095 days.
Keep logs in Standard for 30 days, then transition directly to Archive until day 1095, and delete them afterward.
Maintain a dedicated Standard-class bucket for the latest 7 days of logs and use Storage Transfer Service to copy older data to an on-premises NFS server for the remaining 3 years.

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Answer Description

Because the logs are heavily accessed during the first week, they should start in the Standard storage class for its low-latency reads and no minimum-storage duration. After day 7 they become infrequently accessed (roughly four times a year), which aligns with the Coldline class-designed for data accessed less than once a quarter, offering a much lower $/GB than Standard or Nearline but still providing sub-second access when needed. Coldline's 90-day minimum storage period is acceptable because the objects will be retained for three years. Adding an intermediate Nearline tier would raise total cost with little benefit, and moving directly to Archive would reduce capacity charges but increase retrieval latency (hours) and per-GB restore fees, which is inappropriate when audits can occur several times a year. Off-loading to on-premises storage violates the requirement that objects stay in us-central1 Cloud Storage. Therefore, transitioning from Standard to Coldline after 7 days and retaining for 3 years is the most cost-effective compliant strategy.

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