GCP Professional Data Engineer Practice Question

A media company must retain 180 TB of 4-K user-generated video files in the European Economic Area for seven years. Each file becomes immutable after upload, is requested by viewers fewer than four times per month on average, and must be delivered over HTTPS with the least possible operational effort. The business wants to minimize total storage cost while still enforcing both the retention period and immutability. Which managed Google Cloud service and configuration best satisfies these requirements?

Store the files on a Filestore Enterprise instance in europe-west1 and keep read-only snapshots for seven years.
Create a dual-region Cloud Storage bucket in the EU, set the storage class to Coldline, and enable Bucket Lock with a seven-year retention policy.
Import the videos into a BigQuery table and set table-level time-based retention to seven years.
Insert each video as a large object in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and retain seven years of point-in-time backups.

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Answer Description

Cloud Storage is Google Cloud's durable, HTTP-accessible object store for unstructured data. A dual-region bucket located in the EU keeps all data physically within the required geography while providing regional redundancy. Choosing the Coldline storage class minimizes ongoing cost because objects are accessed infrequently (≈3 % of data read per month) and Coldline's lower $/GB storage price more than offsets its higher retrieval charges under that access pattern. Enabling Bucket Lock with a seven-year retention policy turns on WORM behavior, preventing deletion or overwrite until the retention period expires and therefore meeting the immutability mandate.

BigQuery is optimized for analytical columnar data, not large binary objects, and would be far more expensive at this scale while offering no object-level WORM controls. Filestore is a managed POSIX file system that incurs higher per-GB costs and requires client-side snapshots to approximate immutability. Cloud SQL is limited in total storage capacity, incurs high license costs per GB, and is not designed to serve 4-K media over HTTPS. Therefore, Cloud Storage Coldline with Bucket Lock is the only choice that meets all requirements with the lowest cost and minimal management overhead.

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