Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business Practice Question
A retail company experiences sudden traffic spikes during holiday sales. They want to automatically add or remove compute capacity to handle the load without manual intervention. Which Google Cloud feature 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
✓
Managed instance groups with autoscaling
Managed instance groups with autoscaling automatically adjust the number of VM instances based on load, ensuring scalability without over-provisioning.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Cloud Load Balancing
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Load Balancing provides a single anycast IP and distributes incoming traffic across healthy backend VMs, but it is a traffic-routing layer, not a capacity controller. It does not monitor utilization signals or modify the number of running instances in response to demand. To absorb traffic spikes, it must be paired with a managed instance group autoscaler, so relying on the load balancer alone leaves fixed capacity that can still be overwhelmed.
- ✓
Managed instance groups with autoscaling
Why this is correct
Managed instance groups with autoscaling directly address sudden spikes by continuously evaluating metrics such as CPU utilization, requests per second, or custom Cloud Monitoring signals and adjusting the number of VM instances within configured minimum and maximum boundaries. When a spike is detected, the autoscaler provisions additional VMs and then scales down after demand subsides, while health checks and instance templates ensure each new VM is immediately ready to serve traffic. This is the standard Google Cloud solution for elastic compute capacity behind a load balancer.
- ✗
Cloud Functions
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Functions is a serverless compute platform that automatically scales function instances per incoming event, but it is designed for short-lived, event-driven or synchronous tasks with execution timeouts measured in minutes. A retail website experiencing sustained traffic spikes on VM-based workloads would require stateful sessions, custom binaries, or long-running processes that Cloud Functions does not support. Therefore, while Cloud Functions can offload specific API calls, it cannot replace the autoscaling VM capacity that MIGs provide.
- ✗
Cloud CDN
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN improves responsiveness and reduces origin load by serving cached objects from Google's global edge caches, but it only helps with static or cacheable content such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. It does not modify the underlying compute tier, so uncached or dynamic requests still reach the backend VMs, and the origin's fixed capacity remains a bottleneck if traffic spikes are not cacheable. CDN should be used to reduce the magnitude of traffic reaching the backend, not to scale the backend itself.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
Key term
Scalability
Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources, either by making the existing resources more powerful (vertical scaling) or by adding more resources (horizontal scaling).
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JA
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.