Question

A financial services company runs a stateful licensed application on a single Compute Engine VM in the us-central1-a zone. The application stores critical data on a zonal persistent disk. The team needs to ensure that if the entire zone becomes unavailable, they can bring the application back up quickly in another zone within the same region without restoring from backups, while keeping infrastructure changes minimal. What should they configure for the storage layer?

Accepted Answer

Replace the zonal persistent disk with a regional persistent disk that synchronously replicates across two zones in the region.

Answer

Enable Cloud Storage bucket versioning and copy the disk contents to the bucket on a schedule.

Answer

Take hourly persistent disk snapshots and restore the latest snapshot to a new VM if the zone fails.

Answer

Attach a Local SSD to the VM and configure application-level replication to a second VM in another region.