Question

A financial services company runs a nightly batch job that consolidates transactions and must complete within a strict 4-hour window to meet regulatory reporting deadlines. The job is fault-tolerant and can checkpoint and resume from partial results. Leadership wants to minimize compute cost while guaranteeing the deadline is never missed. Which compute strategy on Google Cloud best meets these business and technical requirements?

Accepted Answer

Provision a managed instance group that mixes a baseline of standard on-demand VMs with additional Spot VMs, and configure autoscaling so the on-demand baseline can complete the job within the window if Spot capacity is reclaimed.

Answer

Run the job entirely on Spot VMs to achieve the lowest possible cost, relying on the checkpointing to recover from preemptions.

Answer

Run the job on a fixed fleet of on-demand VMs sized for peak load and purchase no committed use discounts, since the job runs only once per night.

Answer

Deploy the job on a single large on-demand VM with a 3-year committed use discount to reduce the hourly rate as much as possible.