Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
A company runs a batch processing workload every night that can tolerate interruptions. The workload runs on Compute Engine VMs and takes 2 hours to complete. They want to reduce costs. Which VM pricing model should they use?
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
✓
Preemptible VMs
Preemptible VMs offer significant cost savings (up to 80% discount) but can be terminated at any time. Since the workload is batch and can tolerate interruptions, this is the most cost-effective choice.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Preemptible VMs
Why this is correct
Preemptible VMs run on Google's surplus compute capacity and are available at up to 60–80% lower per-second cost than standard VMs. They can be reclaimed at any time and have a maximum runtime of 24 hours, making them ideal for idempotent, fault-tolerant batch processing. A nightly job can simply be restarted or resumed from a checkpoint if interrupted.
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Committed use discounts
Why it's wrong here
Committed use discounts (CUDs) require you to purchase 1-year or 3-year resource commitments for vCPUs, memory, GPUs, and licenses in a specific region. This pricing model is designed for predictable, always-on, steady-state workloads, not a short nightly batch that has long idle windows. With CUDs you pay for committed capacity even when it is not fully utilized, so the total cost for a 2-hour-per-night job would far exceed preemptible pricing.
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Sole-tenant nodes
Why it's wrong here
Sole-tenant nodes let you rent an entire physical server so that your VMs are the only ones on that host, which is required for bring-your-own-license (BYOL), compliance, or data residency. They provide isolation and dedicated hardware but carry a premium price; there is no discount for short jobs or interruptibility. Since you pay for the whole node regardless of how many VMs you run, sole-tenant nodes increase cost and are not a cost-optimization mechanism.
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Sustained use discounts
Why it's wrong here
Sustained use discounts (SUDs) automatically discount instances that run for more than 25% of a billing month, rising incrementally to up to 30% for full-month usage. They apply only to standard (on-demand) VM types, not preemptible or Spot VMs, and reward long-running, continuous workloads. A batch job that completes within a few hours nightly accumulates relatively little monthly runtime, so the discount is modest and far less than preemptible savings.
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Related to this question
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Compute Options on Google Cloud
Key term
Batch
Batch is a cloud computing service that runs large numbers of computing jobs as a group, or batch, without needing to manage individual servers.
Key term
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
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