GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your organization has 50 Java microservices currently deployed as unmanaged VMs on Compute Engine. The CTO wants an architecture that will let individual services adopt new Google Cloud runtimes, such as Cloud Run or other services that may be released in the future, with minimal code changes. Operational effort must drop immediately, and the team wants to keep its existing CI/CD tooling but is willing to modernize packaging. What should you implement first to best meet these goals?

Containerize each microservice and deploy them on Google Kubernetes Engine with Anthos Service Mesh, storing the images in Artifact Registry.
Replace every microservice with individual Cloud Functions triggered by HTTP, rewriting code to the function signature.
Rewrite all microservices into a single App Engine flexible environment application to abstract the infrastructure layer.
Keep the services on Compute Engine but standardize custom VM images and use OS patch management for lower maintenance.

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Answer Description

Containerizing each microservice decouples the application code from the underlying host, giving every service a well-defined contract: a container image. Deploying those images to Google Kubernetes Engine immediately reduces operational toil through managed control planes and autoscaling, while still letting the team use its current CI/CD system to build and push images to Artifact Registry. Adding Anthos Service Mesh further separates traffic management and observability concerns from the workloads, so services can later move-one at a time-to Cloud Run, Cloud Run for Anthos, or future Google Cloud compute products that accept OCI-compatible containers without significant refactoring.

Migrating to a single App Engine application removes modularity and would require a second major rewrite to adopt other runtimes later. Relying on improved VM images keeps the tight VM dependency and doesn't facilitate easy porting to newer services. Rewriting everything as Cloud Functions forces a large up-front rewrite and may not fit all microservice patterns, reducing flexibility for future options.

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