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A global online gaming company is experiencing unpredictable and sudden spikes in user traffic during new game launches and popular events. Their backend services, running on Google Compute Engine, often struggle to scale quickly enough, leading to degraded performance and outages. The company needs a solution that can automatically and rapidly adjust compute resources to match demand, even for very short, intense spikes, minimizing operational overhead. Which Google Cloud solution should you recommend to address this challenge?
- ACloud SQL Read Replicas
- BCloud CDN
- CDedicated Interconnect
- DManaged Instance Groups (MIGs) with Autoscaling
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) with Autoscaling
Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) with Autoscaling are specifically designed to handle fluctuating workloads by automatically adding or removing Compute Engine instances based on defined policies (e.g., CPU utilization, HTTP load balancer capacity). This ensures rapid scaling to meet sudden traffic spikes for backend services.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Cloud SQL Read Replicas scale database read operations but do not scale the application's compute backend that processes user requests.
- B. Cloud CDN caches content closer to users to reduce latency and origin load but does not scale backend compute resources.
- C. Dedicated Interconnect provides a direct, private connection between an on-premises network and Google Cloud, which is unrelated to scaling compute resources for application traffic spikes.
Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) with Autoscaling
A Google Compute Engine feature that uses a group of identical VM instances, managed as a single entity, with automatic scaling capabilities to adjust instance count based on load.
- Automatically adds/removes VMs based on metrics (CPU, load balancer utilization).
- Provides high availability and self-healing for instances.
- Supports rolling updates for applications.
- Ideal for stateless and stateful applications (with stateful MIGs).
Memory trick: MIGs manage fluctuating game loads.