Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A company has deployed a web application on Compute Engine in us-central1-a. Users in Europe report high latency. The company wants to reduce latency by serving traffic from a location closer to European users. However, they currently use a zonal managed instance group. What is the MOST cost-effective and operationally simple approach to reduce latency for European users?
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
✓
Change the managed instance group to regional, and use an HTTP(S) load balancer with the backend in europe-west1
A regional managed instance group across multiple zones in a European region (e.g., europe-west1) with a global load balancer will route users to the nearest backend, reducing latency. Recreating in a different zone in the same region doesn't help. Moving to Cloud Run might help but requires containerising the app. Using a single zone in Europe is not as resilient.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Create a new zonal instance group in europe-west1-a and use a round-robin DNS
Why it's wrong here
A zonal managed instance group in europe-west1-a still represents a single failure domain: if that zone experiences an outage or is unavailable, the application goes down. Round-robin DNS only rotates requests across the instance group's IP addresses—it performs no health checking or latency-aware routing, and it cannot steer users to the least-loaded or nearest healthy instance. To get both regional redundancy and intelligent traffic distribution, the correct architecture is a regional MIG fronted by an external HTTP(S) load balancer.
- ✗
Keep the instance group in us-central1 but enable Cloud CDN
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN primarily caches static objects such as images, CSS, and JavaScript; dynamic application responses are passed through to the origin in us-central1. A web application with session-based or personally identifiable dynamic content will see little cache hit rate improvement, so users in Europe will still experience transatlantic round-trip latency. Moving the compute backend to a European region, not caching at the edge, is what actually reduces network RTT for the dynamic parts of the application.
- ✓
Change the managed instance group to regional, and use an HTTP(S) load balancer with the backend in europe-west1
Why this is correct
A regional managed instance group automatically distributes instances across zones within europe-west1, protecting against a single-zone failure and enabling managed instance group health checking and autohealing. The external HTTP(S) load balancer uses Google's global anycast IP to terminate the user's connection at the closest Google edge PoP, then forwards the request over Google's backbone to a healthy backend in europe-west1. This combination minimizes user latency for European traffic while maintaining the existing single global endpoint for DNS.
- ✗
Move the application to Cloud Run and deploy in europe-west1
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Run is a serverless compute platform that would require the web application to be containerized and modified to handle per-request scaling and statelessness; it is not a drop-in change from a Compute Engine-managed instance group. Even if Cloud Run is deployed in europe-west1, the application must support requests with possible cold starts and environment constraints, and the team would still need a load balancer or HTTPS ingress to route traffic. The stated goal is to improve latency for the existing Compute Engine-based application, so changing the instance group to regional and putting it behind an HTTP(S) load balancer is the lower-risk, directly relevant fix.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Cloud Run
Cloud Run is a fully managed compute platform from Google Cloud that lets you run containerized applications in a serverless environment, automatically scaling from zero to thousands of requests.
Key term
Regional
Regional refers to a deployment strategy where cloud resources are distributed across multiple geographic areas to improve availability, reduce latency, and meet compliance requirements.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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