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A media company needs to process large volumes of video files (terabytes) for encoding, transcoding, and content analysis. These tasks are typically long-running, CPU-intensive, and can be broken down into independent, parallelizable jobs. The company wants a serverless solution that automatically scales and manages the underlying infrastructure, allowing them to focus solely on their processing logic. Which Google Cloud product is best suited for this use case?

  1. AGoogle Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  2. BCloud Functions
  3. CCloud Run
  4. DCompute Engine
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a serverless platform for containerized applications that automatically scales from zero to many instances. It is suitable for long-running, CPU-intensive tasks when packaged as containers, providing automatic scaling and infrastructure management without requiring explicit server provisioning.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. GKE requires cluster management and orchestration, which is less 'serverless' than Cloud Run, even though it provides container orchestration.
  • B. Cloud Functions are ideal for short-lived, event-driven functions (up to 9 minutes), not long-running video processing.
  • D. Compute Engine provides IaaS VMs, requiring manual management of servers and scaling, which is not serverless.

Cloud Run

A fully managed serverless platform for containerized applications that scales automatically based on demand.

  • Supports any language or library that can be containerized.
  • Scales automatically from zero to many instances.
  • Ideal for web services, APIs, and batch jobs.

Memory trick: Run your containers, Cloud Run handles everything.

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