Cloud Digital Leader How Google Cloud Resources Are Managed 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.

• ✗

  Sustained use discounts

  Why it's wrong here

  Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs) are automatic discounts that apply per project and per region when a VM runs for more than 25% of a month, with the discount growing incrementally up to a maximum of 30% for most machine types. They require no upfront commitment or contract, but they cannot match the larger savings of a 3-year Committed Use Discount for a long-lived, predictable workload. Additionally, SUDs are calculated after any CUDs are applied and only apply to usage that exceeds your committed amount, so they are not a substitute for explicitly choosing a term-based commitment.

• ✗

  Preemptible VM instances

  Why it's wrong here

  Preemptible VMs are significantly cheaper than standard instances (up to 60-91% lower price), but they can be terminated by Compute Engine at any time, with a maximum lifetime of 24 hours, making them unsuitable for a 3-year continuous workload. They are designed for stateless, fault-tolerant batch workloads that can handle interruptions, not for consistent, predictable usage that requires high availability. Choosing preemptible VMs for a 3-year reservation would risk severe availability issues and would not provide a guaranteed discount structure for the entire term.

• ✗

  Reserved instances (like AWS)

  Why it's wrong here

  In Google Cloud, the term 'reserved instances' is not used; the equivalent purchasing option is Committed Use Discounts (CUDs). Legacy AWS-based terminology like 'reserved instances' does not map to any actual GCP offering, and simply referring to it without specifying CUDs would not result in any discount. Even if interpreted as an attempt to reserve capacity, CUDs do not guarantee capacity reservation—they only provide a price discount for committed usage.

• ✓

  Committed use discounts with a 3-year term

  Why this is correct

  Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) let you commit to a consistent baseline of vCPUs, memory, and other resources for a 1-year or 3-year term, and in return you receive a substantial price reduction—often up to 70% for a 3-year commitment on many machine types. For a predictable, always-on workload spanning 3 years, this offers the highest discount among all options shown, since sustained use discounts are capped at about 30% and do not require a contract, while preemptible VMs are unreliable. The trade-off is that you are financially obligated to pay for the committed resources even if you don't use them, which is acceptable for steady workloads.

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