Professional Cloud Architect · Free Practice Question Hard
Question 18
You have been hired by a rapidly growing e-commerce company to design their new cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The company anticipates a significant increase in user traffic during the holiday season, with peaks expected to be 10x their normal load. The solution needs to handle this increased traffic without any downtime and must also minimize operational costs when traffic is low. Additionally, the platform needs to ensure data consistency across regions, provide a reliable shopping cart experience, and comply with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requirements. Which architecture would best meet the company’s requirements?
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A
Implement the e-commerce application on Cloud Run, with a multi-regional Cloud SQL instance and a managed Redis instance for caching.
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B
Deploy the e-commerce application on a single GCE instance with a regional persistent disk, and manually scale the instance during peak times.
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C
Deploy the e-commerce application using App Engine Standard Environment with auto-scaling, and use a single-region Cloud SQL instance for the database.
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D
Use GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) to deploy a containerized e-commerce application, with auto-scaling enabled based on CPU utilization and a multi-regional database with Cloud Spanner.
Reveal correct answer
Correct answer: D
A.
Cloud Run is a good choice for running containerized workloads with auto-scaling, but it might not be the best fit for a high-traffic e-commerce platform that requires persistent connections, such as for shopping carts. Moreover, while a multi-regional Cloud SQL instance provides some level of redundancy, Cloud SQL's replication is asynchronous, which might not meet strict data consistency requirements. Additionally, Redis provides fast in-memory caching but does not inherently offer multi-region consistency.
B.
This option lacks the ability to scale automatically, which is crucial for handling unpredictable traffic spikes. Manually scaling is not only inefficient but also prone to human error, potentially leading to downtime during high-traffic periods. Additionally, a single GCE instance does not provide redundancy across regions, which is a critical requirement for data consistency and availability.
C.
While App Engine provides auto-scaling, the use of a single-region Cloud SQL instance does not meet the requirement for multi-regional consistency. In the event of a regional failure, the application could experience downtime or data loss. This setup also may not fully satisfy PCI DSS compliance without additional configurations, such as data encryption at rest and in transit.
D.
GKE provides robust auto-scaling capabilities, ensuring that the infrastructure can automatically handle the increased load during peak times and scale down during off-peak periods to reduce costs. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, strongly consistent database that can handle multi-regional deployments, which is ideal for ensuring data consistency and compliance with PCI DSS requirements. This setup meets all the business requirements for scalability, reliability, and compliance.
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