Google ACE Planning and Configuring 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.

• ✗

  Compute Engine with sole-tenant nodes

  Why it's wrong here

  Sole-tenant nodes dedicate an entire physical server to your VMs, which is primarily used for meeting compliance or licensing requirements such as Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) or enforcing strict workload isolation. For a daily batch analytics job, this isolation provides no performance or cost benefit, and because you are paying for the entire physical node rather than shared multi-tenant infrastructure, it is significantly more expensive than any standard Compute Engine option.

• ✓

  Compute Engine with preemptible VMs

  Why this is correct

  Preemptible VMs are Compute Engine instances that are up to 80% cheaper than standard VMs and are ideal for fault-tolerant, batch workloads. They can be terminated by Google at any time within their maximum runtime of 24 hours, so the job must be checkpointed or designed to restart gracefully. Since the batch job runs daily and is inherently tolerant of interruption, using preemptible VMs maximizes cost savings without sacrificing correctness, making this the most cost-effective choice.

• ✗

  Compute Engine with standard VMs and sustained use discount

  Why it's wrong here

  Sustained use discounts automatically apply to standard VMs that run for a significant portion of the month (more than 25%), but for a batch job that runs only 2 hours per day (about 280 hours over a month, roughly 38%), the discount is modest and applies only to the per-second usage. Even with that discount, standard VMs cost several times more per hour than preemptible VMs. Because the workload is not latency-sensitive and can tolerate interruptions, preemptible VMs still offer dramatically lower total cost.

• ✗

  Compute Engine with committed use discount for 1 year

  Why it's wrong here

  Committed use discounts offer substantial pricing reductions (up to 70%) in exchange for a 1-year or 3-year commitment to pay for a certain amount of vCPUs and memory, regardless of actual usage. Since the batch job runs only 2 hours per day, committing to full-time capacity means paying for resources that sit idle for 22 hours each day, which is wasteful and undermines the discount's benefit. Preemptible VMs, on the other hand, require no long-term commitment and align costs directly with the short daily execution window.

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