GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your organization operates a global e-commerce platform on Google Cloud. Engineers currently monitor CPU saturation of the primary Cloud SQL instance using dashboards and manually launch an additional read replica during peak sales. Leadership asks you to align the process with the operational excellence pillar of the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework by codifying operations and removing manual toil. Which approach best satisfies this goal while keeping human intervention to a minimum?

Create a Cloud Monitoring alert that publishes to Pub/Sub when CPU exceeds 80%, invoke a Cloud Run service that applies a Terraform module to add a new Cloud SQL read replica, and roll back automatically when utilization normalizes.
Upgrade to Premium Support so that Google Cloud support engineers can provision additional replicas within the 15-minute SLA for P1 tickets.
Update internal documentation with detailed run-book steps and instruct the on-call engineer to execute gcloud sql instances create upon receiving an alert email.
Configure an uptime check on the instance and rely on the NOC team to watch a dashboard and scale out replicas manually when they see sustained high CPU.

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Answer Description

Operational excellence recommends implementing and managing operations through code and automation, turning routine run-book steps into event-driven workflows. Creating a Cloud Monitoring alert that publishes to Pub/Sub and triggers a Cloud Run service (or Cloud Function) allows the response logic-implemented as Terraform or other IaC scripts-to automatically provision a new Cloud SQL read replica when CPU crosses the threshold. This eliminates manual steps and captures the procedure as reusable code. Simply documenting the procedure, upgrading the support plan, or relying only on dashboards and uptime checks still leaves humans in the critical path and does not embody the "operations as code" principle.

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