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PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-ARCHITECT · Question #351

Your company wants to optimize Google Cloud costs for their development and staging environments. These environments are workstations used by developers Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM…

The correct answer is A. Schedule the virtual machines to start and stop to match your team's work schedule. Scheduling the virtual machines to automatically start and stop according to the developers’ working hours eliminates compute costs during nights and weekends when the environments are idle. This directly addresses the largest source of waste while preserving full performance…

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

Question

Your company wants to optimize Google Cloud costs for their development and staging environments. These environments are workstations used by developers Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM local time. Currently, the environments run on a fleet of nl-standard-4 Compute Engine instances that operate 24/7, leading to a high monthly cost for resources that are idle more than 70% of the time. You need to implement a solution that significantly reduces the monthly cost of these non-production environments without impacting the development team's productivity during work hours. What should you do?

Options

  • ASchedule the virtual machines to start and stop to match your team's work schedule.
  • BPurchase three-year committed use discounts (CUDs) for the existing nl-standard-4 instances.
  • CUpgrade all instances to the N2 machine series.
  • DRe-architect the environments to run on a regional managed instance group (MIG) with

How the community answered

(53 responses)
  • A
    87% (46)
  • B
    2% (1)
  • C
    4% (2)
  • D
    8% (4)

Explanation

Scheduling the virtual machines to automatically start and stop according to the developers’ working hours eliminates compute costs during nights and weekends when the environments are idle. This directly addresses the largest source of waste while preserving full performance and availability during business hours, resulting in a significant and immediate cost reduction without affecting developer productivity.

Topics

#VM scheduling#cost optimization#Compute Engine#non-production environments

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