Google ACE Practice Question: A team deploys a containerized service to Cloud…

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

• ✗

  Increase the minimum number of instances to reduce cold starts

  Why it's wrong here

  Increasing the minimum number of instances keeps more instances warm, which reduces cold-start latency for the first few requests. However, it does not change Cloud Run's default request timeout of 60 seconds; a long-running request that reaches that limit is still terminated regardless of how many instances are available. The symptom described is a timeout on every long request, so the fix is to raise the timeout configuration, not to pre-provision instances.

• ✓

  Increase the Cloud Run request timeout to at least 180 seconds

  Why this is correct

  Cloud Run's default request timeout is 60 seconds, and requests that exceed it are terminated, causing the client to see a timeout error. For requests that legitimately need up to 3 minutes, you must explicitly increase the timeout to at least 180 seconds (the maximum allowed is 3600 seconds). You can set this in the Cloud Run console or via the `--timeout` flag when deploying, which directly extends the per-request handling time to cover the full duration needed.

• ✗

  Set concurrency to 1 to ensure each instance handles only one request at a time

  Why it's wrong here

  Setting concurrency to 1 configures each Cloud Run instance to handle only one request at a time, which affects how many requests can be processed in parallel but does not change the per-request maximum duration. A 3-minute request would still be terminated at the default 60-second timeout even if it is the only request on its instance. This change might actually worsen performance and increase cost due to more instances being provisioned, while leaving the root timeout problem unsolved.

• ✗

  Switch to Cloud Run Jobs instead of Cloud Run Services

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Run Jobs are designed for batch or task-based workloads that run to completion without exposing an HTTP endpoint, whereas this scenario involves serving HTTP requests from clients that can wait up to three minutes. A Cloud Run Service is the correct model for long-running HTTP requests, and its timeout can be increased up to 3600 seconds. Moving to a Job would break the client-server model and is not a valid solution for extending the request handling time of an HTTP service.

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