Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
A company wants to reduce costs for its batch processing jobs that run nightly on Compute Engine. The jobs are fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. They are considering using preemptible VMs. Which THREE statements about preemptible VMs are true?
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 do not offer live migration.
Preemptible VMs can be terminated at any time within 24 hours (typical max 24h). They are significantly cheaper than regular VMs. They cannot be migrated to regular VMs; you must recreate them. They do not offer live migration. They are suitable for fault-tolerant batch jobs.
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 can be migrated to regular VMs if preemption occurs.
Why it's wrong here
When a preemptible VM is preempted, it is terminated rather than migrated. Google Compute Engine sends a preemption notice and then shuts down the instance; the workload must be restarted from durable storage. There is no automated process to 'promote' a preemptible VM to a regular VM during a preemption event.
- ✓
Preemptible VMs do not offer live migration.
Why this is correct
Unlike standard Compute Engine VMs, which benefit from live migration during infrastructure maintenance, preemptible VMs are not live-migrated. If the underlying host needs maintenance or Google reclaims capacity, the VM is immediately terminated within 30 seconds of the preemption notice. This means the VM's state is lost unless you have explicitly saved it elsewhere.
- ✗
Preemptible VMs provide the same SLA as standard VMs.
Why it's wrong here
Preemptible VMs are provided without an availability SLA; Google guarantees no uptime percentage for these instances. Standard VMs have a monthly uptime SLA, typically 99.5% or higher, which is why they cost more. Consequently, preemptible VMs should never be the sole compute for a critical production service.
- ✓
Preemptible VMs can run for up to 24 hours before they may be terminated.
Why this is correct
A preemptible VM has a hard runtime limit of 24 hours, after which Compute Engine automatically terminates it, even if no preemption has occurred. This is separate from the unpredictable preemption events that can happen earlier. Batch jobs must be designed to either complete within this window or regularly write checkpoints to persistent storage.
- ✓
Preemptible VMs are significantly cheaper than standard VMs.
Why this is correct
The primary cost advantage of preemptible VMs is their price: they are typically 60-91% cheaper than standard on-demand VMs, depending on the machine type and region. Because they are reclaimable, the discount reflects the relaxed reliability expectations. For jobs that can restart, these savings can dramatically reduce overall processing costs.
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Related to this question
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Compute Options on Google Cloud
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.
Key term
Batch processing
Batch processing is a method of running high-volume, repetitive data jobs where a group of transactions is collected, processed together automatically, and then results are produced without real-time user interaction.
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