Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business 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.

• ✗

  Cloud Load Balancing

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across configured backend instances to ensure even request processing and high availability, but it does not monitor backend utilization or trigger capacity changes. In the context of holiday traffic spikes, a load balancer alone leaves the instance count static, so you would still need a separate autoscaling mechanism, such as a managed instance group autoscaler, to add or remove VMs. Thus, while useful for routing, it is not the component that scales VM instances.

• ✗

  Google Kubernetes Engine with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

  Why it's wrong here

  The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) in Google Kubernetes Engine adjusts the number of pod replicas running in a workload, not the number of VM instances in the cluster. Even when HPA increases pods, the underlying nodes are provisioned independently by a cluster/node autoscaler, which has its own configuration and monitoring. Because the question explicitly asks for scaling of VM instances, an MIG with autoscaling is a more direct and appropriate solution than a pod-level scaler, especially if the retail application is not containerized on GKE.

• ✗

  Cloud Functions

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Functions is a fully managed, event-driven serverless compute platform that executes stateless code snippets without you provisioning or managing any servers. It has no concept of VM instances to scale, as the service itself abstracts all infrastructure away and handles scaling of function executions, not compute instances. Therefore, it cannot satisfy a requirement to add or remove VM instances during holiday spikes and is unsuitable for a workload that needs explicit control over the underlying virtual machines.

• ✓

  Managed instance group with autoscaling

  Why this is correct

  A managed instance group with autoscaling continuously monitors key signals, such as CPU utilization or load balancer serving capacity, and automatically adds or removes virtual machine instances to meet current demand while staying within configured min/max limits. During holiday traffic spikes, the autoscaler can proactively and reactively adjust the number of VMs, ensuring consistent performance without manual intervention. This is the most direct and purpose-built mechanism for scaling VM instances in Compute Engine, making it the correct answer.

Go deeper

Related to this question