GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your team operates a 3-TB Cloud SQL for MySQL primary instance in the us-central1 region. Compliance demands that, if the entire region becomes unavailable, the application must resume from another region within 15 minutes and with no more than 5 minutes of data loss. The database team wants the simplest fully-managed approach that meets these recovery objectives. Which design should you implement?

Create a cross-region read replica of the Cloud SQL instance in us-east1, keep binary logging enabled (default), and document a failover runbook that promotes the replica and updates application connection strings if us-central1 is lost.
Trigger a Cloud Function every five minutes to export the database to a multi-regional Cloud Storage bucket and import the export into a standby instance when needed.
Enable cross-region automated backups to us-east1 and rely on restoring the most recent backup and applying logs to a new Cloud SQL instance during a disaster.
Migrate the workload to a multi-region Cloud Spanner instance and decommission Cloud SQL to achieve built-in high availability and global consistency.

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Answer Description

Creating a cross-region read replica keeps an up-to-date copy of the primary database in a second region by continuously shipping binary logs. Typical replication lag is measured in seconds, giving an RPO well under five minutes. Because the replica already contains current data, promoting it to a standalone primary and redirecting application traffic can usually be completed within minutes, satisfying a 15-minute RTO with minimal operational work (a single promotion command or API call). Relying only on cross-region automated backups cannot guarantee the required RTO because restoring a multi-terabyte backup and applying logs can take hours. Scheduled exports to Cloud Storage add custom scripting and operational burden and still risk exceeding the 5-minute RPO. Migrating to Cloud Spanner would meet the objectives but requires a complex schema conversion and data migration, violating the mandate for minimal operational overhead. Therefore, the cross-region read-replica approach is the best fit.

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