GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company runs a container-based video-transcoding microservice on a regional GKE Standard cluster. The service is invoked by Cloud Pub/Sub messages, must scale to handle thousands of concurrent jobs during course launches, and can be idle for days at a time. Executives want to eliminate all node management tasks, ensure the service can automatically scale down to zero when unused, and pay only for actual execution time-without rewriting the existing container image. Which approach best satisfies these requirements?

Move the workload to a managed instance group of preemptible Compute Engine VMs that scale with an autoscaler based on Pub/Sub queue length.
Convert the cluster to GKE Autopilot and rely on Cluster Autoscaler to add and delete nodes based on demand spikes.
Deploy the existing container to Cloud Run and invoke it via a Pub/Sub push subscription so it scales automatically from zero to thousands of instances.
Rewrite the microservice as a Google Cloud Function triggered by Pub/Sub to achieve serverless execution.

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Answer Description

Cloud Run is a fully managed, serverless container platform. It accepts OCI-compliant container images, starts instances on demand, supports automatic horizontal scaling up to thousands of containers, and scales down to zero when idle, so you are billed only for CPU, memory, and requests while code is running. This removes the need to manage or patch nodes.

GKE Autopilot reduces-but does not eliminate-operational overhead and continues to charge for provisioned pod resources even when no traffic arrives, so costs accrue during idle periods.

Cloud Functions would require refactoring the container into individual function entry points and is subject to stricter runtime, language, and resource limits, making it less suitable for an existing complex containerized workload.

Managed instance groups of preemptible VMs still leave you responsible for OS maintenance and incur costs whenever VMs run; they cannot natively scale to zero nor provide per-request billing.

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