Your team is building a service that performs compute-heavy processing on batches of data. The data is processed faster based on the speed and number of CPUs on the machine. These batches of data vary

Managing an SFTP server on Compute Engine introduces operational overhead and is less scalable and cost-efficient for varying loads compared to managed services.

While Cloud Storage is suitable for ingestion, using a fixed Compute Engine instance for processing would not scale automatically with varying batch sizes and may not be cost-optimal.

Cloud Storage provides a scalable and secure way for third parties to upload data, while Cloud Functions, triggered by new objects in the bucket, offers a serverless, automatically scaling, and cost-effective compute environment suitable for bursty, compute-heavy processing tasks.

Dataflow is powerful for large-scale data processing but might be an overkill and potentially more expensive for simpler, event-driven batch processing that could be handled by Cloud Functions, especially when minimizing costs is a key objective.