GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company runs a rapidly growing global SaaS billing platform. Eighty percent of traffic originates from North America and Europe. The application must execute thousands of financial transactions per second with ACID guarantees, and every committed transaction must survive a complete regional outage (RPO 0, RTO < 15 minutes). Operations wants a fully managed service that can scale horizontally without manual sharding and lets them apply schema changes with no downtime. Which Google Cloud database solution and deployment option best satisfies these requirements?

Use Cloud Bigtable with two clusters, one in us-central1 and one in europe-west4, leveraging multi-cluster routing.
Migrate the database to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL in us-central1 with a cross-region read replica in europe-west1.
Provision a Cloud Spanner instance using the nam-eur3 multi-region configuration to serve reads and writes from both continents.
Run a multi-master MySQL cluster on Compute Engine managed instance groups spread across us-central1 and europe-west1 with asynchronous replication.

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Answer Description

A multi-region Cloud Spanner instance (for example, the nam-eur3 configuration) automatically replicates data across multiple regions and uses synchronous Paxos commits to provide global strong consistency with an effective recovery point objective of zero and a 99.999 % availability SLA, meeting the RPO 0 / low-RTO requirement even during a regional outage. Spanner's horizontal scaling, automatic sharding, and online schema changes minimize operational overhead.

Cloud SQL with cross-region replicas is limited to a single primary region, offers only asynchronous replication (non-zero RPO) and requires manual sharding to scale. Cloud Bigtable provides petabyte scale and multi-cluster replication but is not relational and only guarantees eventual consistency for cross-region writes, so it cannot meet ACID requirements. Self-managed MySQL on Compute Engine imposes significant operational burden and uses asynchronous replication, resulting in data loss risk during regional failures. Therefore, a multi-region Cloud Spanner deployment is the only option that fulfills all stated requirements.

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