Google ACE Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution Practice Question
An organization needs to run a batch analytics job daily that processes 500 GB of data stored in Cloud Storage. The job runs for 2 hours each day and can tolerate occasional failures. The team wants to minimize compute costs. Which compute option is most cost-effective?
⚠ Common exam trap
ACE often tests the distinction between discounts: candidates pick committed use discounts because they sound cheapest, but commitments require steady usage, and only preemptible/spot VMs match interruptible, short-duration batch workloads.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Compute Engine with preemptible VMs
Preemptible VMs are correct because they cost up to 80% less than standard VMs and are ideal for fault-tolerant batch jobs that can tolerate occasional failures and run for a bounded 2-hour window. The workload's tolerance for interruption and its daily, non-continuous schedule align exactly with the preemptible VM use case, minimizing compute cost.
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.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
GKE Workload Identity
Key term
Organization
An Organization is a top-level container in Google Cloud that represents your company or entities and serves as the root node for all your cloud resources, policies, and access control.
Key term
Preemptible VM
A preemptible VM is a short-lived, low-cost virtual machine instance that cloud providers can terminate at any time, repurposing the underlying hardware for other tasks.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
This ACE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ACE exam.