Learn the most efficient method to back up Compute Engine VM data daily, retain backups for 7 days, and comply with security policies in Google Cloud Platform.
Table of Contents
Question
Your company is running a critical workload on a single Compute Engine VM instance. Your company’s disaster recovery policies require you to back up the entire instance’s disk data every day. The backups must be retained for 7 days. You must configure a backup solution that complies with your company’s security policies and requires minimal setup and configuration. What should you do?
A. Configure the instance to use persistent disk asynchronous replication.
B. Configure daily scheduled persistent disk snapshots with a retention period of 7 days.
C. Configure Cloud Scheduler to trigger a Cloud Function each day that creates a new machine image and deletes machine images that are older than 7 days.
D. Configure a bash script using gsutil to run daily through a cron job. Copy the disk’s files to a Cloud Storage bucket with archive storage class and an object lifecycle rule to delete the objects after 7 days.
Answer
B. Configure daily scheduled persistent disk snapshots with a retention period of 7 days.
Explanation
This solution is the most appropriate for several reasons:
- Minimal setup and configuration: Persistent disk snapshots are a built-in feature of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that requires minimal setup. You can easily schedule snapshots through the GCP console, gcloud command-line tool, or API.
- Security compliance: Snapshots are stored in Google Cloud Storage, which adheres to strict security standards. This ensures compliance with most company security policies without additional configuration.
- Meets backup requirements: Snapshots capture the entire disk data, satisfying the requirement to back up the whole instance’s disk daily.
- Retention policy: GCP allows you to set a retention policy for snapshots, making it easy to keep them for exactly 7 days as required.
- Disaster recovery: Snapshots can be used to quickly restore data or create new instances, which is crucial for disaster recovery.
Let’s briefly examine why the other options are less suitable:
A. Persistent disk asynchronous replication is primarily used for high availability between zones, not for daily backups with retention policies.
C. Using Cloud Scheduler and Cloud Functions to create and manage machine images is more complex and requires more setup than necessary for this task.
D. A custom bash script using gsutil is a manual solution that requires more maintenance and is more prone to errors compared to using native GCP features.
In conclusion, configuring daily scheduled persistent disk snapshots with a 7-day retention period is the most efficient, secure, and compliant solution for backing up the critical workload on your Compute Engine VM instance.
Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification exam practice question and answer (Q&A) dump with detail explanation and reference available free, helpful to pass the Google Associate Cloud Engineer exam and earn Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification.