Your application runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You need to implement Jenkins for deploying application releases to GCP. You want to streamline the release process, lower operational toil, and…

Implementing Jenkins on local workstations is unsuitable for a production-grade CI/CD system due to lack of reliability, scalability, security, and consistent availability.

Implementing Jenkins on Kubernetes on-premises introduces additional infrastructure management overhead and does not fully leverage GCP's native services for an application already running on GCP.

Google Cloud Functions are serverless, ephemeral, and designed for short-lived, event-driven functions, making them an inappropriate platform for hosting a long-running, stateful application like Jenkins.

Implementing Jenkins on Compute Engine virtual machines provides a robust and flexible environment for a persistent Jenkins server, allowing for full control over its configuration, plugins, and integration with GCP services. This setup enables streamlined release pipelines with adequate security configurations for accessing GCP resources, while Compute Engine's managed instance groups can help lower operational toil.