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Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question: A startup needs to quickly deploy a web…
A startup needs to quickly deploy a web application with minimal infrastructure management. They want to focus on code, not servers. Which Google Cloud service model is most appropriate?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between PaaS and FaaS by presenting a scenario that requires a full web application, where candidates mistakenly choose FaaS (Cloud Functions) because they confuse 'serverless' with 'no infrastructure management,' ignoring that FaaS is unsuitable for long-running HTTP applications with stateful sessions.
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
✓
Platform as a Service (PaaS) using App Engine
App Engine is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to deploy web applications without managing servers or operating systems. It automatically handles scaling, load balancing, and patching, which aligns with the startup's requirement to focus on code rather than infrastructure management.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Software as a Service (SaaS) using Gmail
Why it's wrong here
Gmail is a SaaS product that delivers a finished email application; it offers no runtime, storage, or execution environment for your startup's custom web app code. Deploying your application on top of Gmail would require treating email as an integration point, not as a host for HTTP requests or business logic. Thus it fails the requirement to run a custom web application, regardless of infrastructure management.
- ✗
Function as a Service (FaaS) using Cloud Functions
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Functions is a FaaS offering built for short-lived, stateless, event-driven code, not for hosting a complete web application with routing, sessions, and long-lived connections. Each invocation has a strict execution timeout and ephemeral scratch space, so a full app would need to be decomposed into many microservices plus a routing layer and external state storage. This adds complexity rather than minimizing infrastructure management, and the platform is not designed to serve continuous traffic as an always-on application.
- ✗
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using Compute Engine
Why it's wrong here
Compute Engine is an IaaS product that gives you raw virtual machines, but you must provision, configure, and patch the OS, set up load balancing and auto-scaling policies, and manage health checks and capacity. This operational burden directly contradicts the startup's goal of minimizing infrastructure management. While it can run any web app, it requires significant manual infrastructure work before the application is even deployed.
- ✓
Platform as a Service (PaaS) using App Engine
Why this is correct
App Engine is a PaaS that abstracts away the underlying servers, OS, and networking; you simply deploy your code and it automatically handles scaling, load balancing, health checks, and runtime patching. It supports standard frameworks and routes HTTP traffic to your application without any infrastructure provisioning. This matches the need for a quick deployment while keeping your team focused on application code rather than operations.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
App Engine
App Engine is a fully managed serverless platform from Google Cloud that lets developers build and deploy applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Key term
PaaS
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a managed platform for developers to build, run, and manage applications without dealing with the underlying infrastructure.
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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.