Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
A company wants to run a batch job that processes large log files stored in Cloud Storage every night. The job typically runs for 2 hours on a single VM with 16 vCPUs and 64 GB of memory. They want to minimize costs. Which compute option is BEST?
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 offer significant cost savings (up to 60-91% discount) for fault-tolerant batch jobs that can handle interruptions.
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 preemptible VMs
Why this is correct
Preemptible VMs offer a 60-80% cost reduction over standard VMs because they use Google's excess capacity, but they can be terminated at any time after a 30-second warning. For a batch job that processes large logs, you can design the job to be resumable by writing intermediate results to persistent storage, making this the most cost-effective choice without sacrificing completion. The transient nature of the instances is acceptable because the workload is fault-tolerant and can resume from checkpoints.
- ✗
Cloud Run
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Run is a managed serverless platform that runs containers in response to HTTP requests, and its synchronous request-based execution has a 60-minute timeout limit. Large log files often require hours of continuous processing, so a single invocation would time out, forcing you to orchestrate a complex chain of shorter invocations or break the work into many small tasks. That added complexity and the inherent execution ceiling make it less suitable than a simple preemptible VM batch job.
- ✗
Compute Engine with Sole-tenant nodes
Why it's wrong here
Sole-tenant nodes allocate an entire physical server exclusively to your project, which is used for regulatory, licensing, or data-sovereignty requirements where you need guaranteed isolation from other customers' workloads. They are more expensive than standard instances because you are paying for a dedicated physical machine, regardless of actual utilization, so they provide no cost benefit for a batch job that is tolerant to interruption. The isolation is unnecessary for processing log files, making this option both costlier and operationally heavier.
- ✗
Compute Engine with standard VMs
Why it's wrong here
Standard VMs are reliable, always-available instances that run at full price and are not interrupted by Google Cloud. For a batch job that can tolerate interruption and is designed to resume, using standard VMs means paying a premium for tenacity that the workload does not require. Preemptible VMs provide the same compute capacity for a fraction of the cost, so standard VMs are an expensive alternative with no added business value in this scenario.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Cloud storage
Cloud storage is a service that lets you save data on remote servers accessed over the internet instead of on your computer's hard drive.
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.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL 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 GCDL exam.