nerdexam
Google

PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-ARCHITECT · Question #301

Your product team is building a critical, customer-facing application on Google Cloud. The development team wants to use Spanner for their database to take advantage of its horizontal scalability and

The correct answer is C. Develop a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis that includes operational overhead, and present. This is a stakeholder and trade-off decision, not just a pure tech choice. The Google- recommended approach is to perform a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis that includes not only direct service costs, but also operational overhead, maintenance, reliability engineering, and

Submitted by brentm· Mar 30, 2026Optimizing technical and business processes

Question

Your product team is building a critical, customer-facing application on Google Cloud. The development team wants to use Spanner for their database to take advantage of its horizontal scalability and low operational overhead However, the FinOps team is concerned about the direct monthly cost of Spanner and proposed using a self-managed PostgreSQL database on Compute Engine VMs instead. You need to resolve this conflict and ensure the project moves forward with an architecturally sound database choice that balances technical requirements with financial constraints. What should you do?

Options

  • AProvide the development team with a reference architecture for deploying a highly available
  • BSuggest using Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL as a compromise to get a managed service at a lower
  • CDevelop a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis that includes operational overhead, and present
  • DCite the reliability and performance optimization pillars of the Google Cloud Well-Architected

How the community answered

(28 responses)
  • A
    7% (2)
  • B
    25% (7)
  • C
    57% (16)
  • D
    11% (3)

Explanation

This is a stakeholder and trade-off decision, not just a pure tech choice. The Google- recommended approach is to perform a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis that includes not only direct service costs, but also operational overhead, maintenance, reliability engineering, and scaling complexity of a self-managed PostgreSQL on Compute Engine vs. managed options like Spanner. Presenting this TCO in a workshop with development and FinOps enables a data- driven, shared decision that balances technical requirements (scalability, reliability) with financial constraints, ensuring an architecturally sound and agreed-upon database choice.

Topics

#Spanner#TCO analysis#FinOps#database selection

Community Discussion

No community discussion yet for this question.

Full PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-ARCHITECT Practice