Google ACE Deploying and Implementing a Cloud Solution Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Set the timeout to 900 seconds

  Why it's wrong here

  Setting the request timeout to 900 seconds only controls the maximum duration of a single request; it does not influence how many instances are pre-warmed or how many requests each instance can process concurrently. Cold starts still occur when a new instance is spun up to handle additional traffic, and the per-instance concurrency remains unchanged. Therefore, this setting has no direct effect on mitigating latency spikes or idle-time warm-up.

• ✗

  Set CPU always on to true

  Why it's wrong here

  Enabling CPU always on ensures that the instance's CPU is allocated even outside of request processing, which prevents throttling during startup or when shuffling data. However, it does not keep instances alive between requests, nor does it increase the number of requests that an instance can serve at once. Cold starts and concurrency limits are governed by instance count and concurrency settings, not by CPU allocation policies.

• ✓

  Set min-instances to a value greater than 0 (e.g., 1)

  Why this is correct

  Setting min-instances to a value greater than 0, such as 1, instructs Cloud Run to keep at least one instance always running and fully initialized, so baseline traffic never experiences the latency penalty of a cold start. This pre-warmed instance is ready to serve immediately, eliminating the delay caused by pulling a container image and booting the runtime. Note that this approach incurs billing even when there is no traffic, and it only removes cold starts for the first instance; a sudden burst beyond that instance's concurrency can still trigger new cold starts.

• ✗

  Set max-instances to a high value

  Why it's wrong here

  Setting a high max-instances value does not prevent cold starts; it only raises the upper bound on how many instances Cloud Run may create. When traffic spikes, Cloud Run still spins up new instances from zero, and those new instances experience full cold-start latency. In fact, a high max-instances value can even exacerbate cold starts during sudden bursts because it allows the service to scale out aggressively, whereas a lower max might force more requests to queue on existing instances.

• ✓

  Set concurrency to a value higher than 1 (e.g., 80)

  Why this is correct

  Setting concurrency to a value higher than 1 (e.g., 80) allows each container instance to handle multiple requests simultaneously, so the service can absorb more traffic without needing to create as many new instances. This reduces the frequency of cold starts during traffic spikes because existing instances have spare capacity to process incoming requests. However, concurrency alone does not eliminate cold starts for the first request when no instances are running unless combined with min-instances.

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