GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company hosts a Java web service on a single n2-standard-4 Compute Engine VM in the us-central1-b zone behind a regional external HTTP(S) load balancer. A recent kernel panic left the service offline until an admin manually recreated the instance. The CTO asks for a redesign that (1) restores a failed VM within 90 seconds, (2) survives the loss of an entire zone in us-central1, (3) keeps operational effort and cost low, and (4) requires no application changes. Which solution best meets these requirements?

Place the current VM in a single-zone managed instance group, enable automatic restart and live migration, and rely on the existing HTTP(S) load balancer to handle recovery.
Containerize the application and deploy it on Cloud Run with the minimum instances setting at zero, fronted by Cloud CDN to absorb failures.
Move the workload to a regional managed instance group with a minimum size of two instances distributed across two zones, configure an HTTP health check for autohealing, enable autoscaling to a maximum of four instances, and keep the existing external HTTP(S) load balancer in front of the group.
Create one unmanaged instance group in each zone and use Cloud Scheduler to invoke a Cloud Function that recreates any VM failing a health probe; continue using a regional TCP load balancer to distribute traffic across groups.

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Answer Description

A regional managed instance group (MIG) automatically spreads its VMs across at least two zones in the selected region and monitors each instance with a health check. When a VM becomes unhealthy, the autohealing policy recreates it, typically within the health-check interval you configure, so a 90-second recovery target is achievable. Keeping a minimum of two instances ensures one instance remains available even if a whole zone fails, and the existing HTTP(S) load balancer can continue routing traffic without manual intervention. The other options either remain single-zone, rely on custom scripts and manual orchestration, or need code changes that violate the stated constraints, so they do not fully satisfy all four requirements.

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