GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your team needs CI integration tests for a Terraform module that provisions a Cloud Run service, a Pub/Sub topic, and IAM bindings. For each GitHub pull request the pipeline must: 1) create the stack in an isolated Google Cloud environment, 2) run a smoke test that invokes the new Cloud Run HTTP endpoint, and 3) delete all resources afterward. The production GCS state bucket must remain untouched, costs kept low, and IAM impact limited to the test. Which approach best meets these goals?

Use Cloud Build with Cloud Deploy to push the module to a shared staging project where resources remain permanently, run tests there, and skip the destroy step to save time.
Trigger a Cloud Function that deploys the module with Deployment Manager in the production project, runs tests, and removes the Deployment Manager deployment afterward.
Use a Cloud Build pull-request trigger that creates a temporary project with a least-privilege service account, overrides the Terraform backend to a per-PR GCS bucket, runs terraform apply, invokes gcloud run services invoke for the smoke test, then runs terraform destroy and deletes the project.
Have Cloud Build apply each resource in the production project with -target, run tests, and then re-apply the main branch state to roll back the changes.

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Answer Description

Running the tests in Cloud Build with an ephemeral project provides full isolation. The build creates a temporary project using a least-privilege service account, overrides the Terraform backend to point at a per-PR GCS bucket, and executes terraform apply. A subsequent step calls gcloud run services invoke (or curl) to hit the endpoint, then terraform destroy tears everything down and the project is deleted. This avoids touching production state, limits IAM scope, and incurs only short-lived resource costs. Alternatives either deploy to the production project, leave resources behind, or rely on tools that do not satisfy the isolation and cleanup requirements.

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