GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your team is modernizing an on-prem payment-authorization component. You have packaged the code as a stateless container image that exposes an HTTP endpoint and completes each call in under 30 seconds. Demand is highly bursty: marketing campaigns can create thousands of concurrent requests, while overnight traffic often drops to zero. The operations team insists on paying only for actual request execution, avoiding any cluster or VM management, and still needs the service to reach a Cloud SQL instance through VPC connectivity. Which Google Cloud compute platform best meets these requirements?

Refactor the service into Cloud Functions (2nd gen) and connect to Cloud SQL with Cloud SQL Auth Proxy.
Create a GKE Autopilot cluster, run the container as a Deployment, and use Cloud NAT for outbound access to Cloud SQL.
Deploy the container to Cloud Run (fully managed) with a Serverless VPC Access connector.
Launch the container on a Compute Engine managed instance group behind an external HTTP(S) load balancer.

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Answer Description

Cloud Run is designed for stateless container images that handle HTTP requests and automatically scale from zero to many instances based on traffic, so no resources run-and no charges accrue-when the service is idle. Billing is calculated per second for CPU, memory, and networking only while requests are being processed. Cloud Run also supports Serverless VPC Access connectors, enabling private connectivity to Cloud SQL without any instance-level network configuration.

Cloud Functions (2nd gen) provides similar scaling and per-request billing but is optimized for single-purpose function handlers rather than full microservices, and would require refactoring the existing containerized service.

GKE Autopilot removes node management but still charges for reserved pod resources even when no requests arrive, and cluster administration tasks such as workload definitions and upgrades remain.

A Compute Engine managed instance group can be configured to scale down to zero VMs, but you still need to create and maintain instance templates, operating-system patching, and an external HTTP(S) load balancer. Costs accrue while any VM is running and for the persistent load balancer, so the solution does not realize true per-request billing or eliminate infrastructure management.

Therefore, Cloud Run with a Serverless VPC Access connector best satisfies all stated requirements.

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