Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
What is the primary benefit of using preemptible VMs on Compute Engine?
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
✓
Cost savings for fault-tolerant workloads
Preemptible VMs are significantly cheaper than standard VMs but can be terminated at any time. They are ideal for fault-tolerant, batch workloads.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Support for live migration
Why it's wrong here
Preemptible VMs are designed for interruption; they do not support live migration because the entire VM is terminated when Google's scheduler reclaims the capacity, rather than being transparently moved to another host. This means any in-memory state is lost, making live migration an impossible benefit for these ephemeral instances.
- ✗
Higher performance than standard VMs
Why it's wrong here
Preemptible VMs use the same underlying machine types and compute resources as standard VMs, so there is no inherent performance advantage. The preemption mechanism adds no acceleration; the only differences are the discounted price and the fact that Google can terminate the VM at any time, which does not enhance throughput or computational speed.
- ✗
Guaranteed availability of resources
Why it's wrong here
Preemptible VMs provide no availability guarantee; they can be reclaimed by Google within 24 hours of creation, and there is no service commitment for uptime. Consequently, they are unsuitable for workloads requiring persistent availability and are meant only for batch processing or fault-tolerant jobs that can tolerate sudden termination.
- ✓
Cost savings for fault-tolerant workloads
Why this is correct
Preemptible VMs cost up to 80% less than standard VMs, making them ideal for fault-tolerant workloads that can survive instance termination, such as batch data processing, rendering, or stateless web serving. This cost benefit is the primary purpose of using them, not performance or availability, and it enables large-scale compute tasks under a constrained budget.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Compute Options on Google Cloud
Key term
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
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.
About these practice questions
One of 829 original GCDL practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.