A financial analytics company is designing a cost-optimized disaster recovery (DR) architecture on Google Cloud for a non-critical internal processing web application. The organization has established the following operational requirements and constraints: Cost Efficiency: Minimize compute spend by running only a single active VM instance and avoiding continuously running standby compute instances. Automated Instance Recovery: If the active VM or application service fails, the platform must automatically provision a replacement VM without requiring manual administrative intervention. Data Recovery & RPO: Data changes are captured through scheduled Persistent Disk snapshots, defining the organization's Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Endpoint Consistency: The frontend IP address exposed to clients must remain constant during and after instance recreation. Which disaster recovery architectural pattern should you implement?

Deploy a Managed Instance Group (MIG) with a target size of 1 behind an Application Load Balancer, using an instance template whose startup script restores and mounts the latest disk snapshot.: ### What the Cold Standby Pattern Is The **cold failover pattern** using a **Managed Instance Group (MIG)** with a target size of one is a cost-effective disaster recovery architecture in Google Cloud. It combines automated instance autohealing, predefined **instance templates**, and **Persistent Disk snapshots** to recover a failed workload without paying for idle standby compute instances. ### How It Meets the Requirements - **Cost Efficiency**: Setting the MIG **target size to 1** ensures that only a single VM runs at any given time, eliminating the overhead of idle secondary instances. - **Automated Instance Recovery**: Integrated **HTTP health checks** detect application or instance crashes. When a failure occurs, the MIG automatically recreates the VM instance in the zone using the specified **instance template**. - **Data Recovery & RPO**: The VM's startup script fetches the latest **Persistent Disk snapshot** and attaches/mounts the restored disk upon startup, achieving the target RPO defined by snapshot frequency. - **Endpoint Consistency**: Placing an **external or internal Application Load Balancer** in front of the MIG ensures that incoming client requests consistently target the same stable virtual IP address regardless of backend VM replacements. ### Key Advantages and Capabilities - **Automated Autohealing**: Provides self-healing compute capabilities that eliminate manual intervention for single-VM failures. - **Predictable Configuration**: Uses custom images and instance templates to ensure configuration consistency across VM recreations. - **Decoupled Frontend**: Isolates client-facing networking from backend instance lifecycles using Google Cloud load balancers. - **Cross-Zone Portability**: Persistent Disk snapshots are stored regionally/multi-regionally, allowing manual disk reconstruction in another zone if a full zonal disruption occurs. ### Why This Is Optimal This architecture perfectly balances recovery automation with aggressive cost reduction, delivering a functional cold DR strategy without the resource waste of active duplicate servers.

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Cold Dr Pattern Managed Instance Group

Section: Backup and recovery

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A financial analytics company is designing a cost-optimized disaster recovery (DR) architecture on Google Cloud for a non-critical internal processing web application. The organization has established the following operational requirements and constraints:

Cost Efficiency: Minimize compute spend by running only a single active VM instance and avoiding continuously running standby compute instances.
Automated Instance Recovery: If the active VM or application service fails, the platform must automatically provision a replacement VM without requiring manual administrative intervention.
Data Recovery & RPO: Data changes are captured through scheduled Persistent Disk snapshots, defining the organization's Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Endpoint Consistency: The frontend IP address exposed to clients must remain constant during and after instance recreation.

Which disaster recovery architectural pattern should you implement?

Deploy a Managed Instance Group (MIG) with a target size of 1 behind an Application Load Balancer, using an instance template whose startup script restores and mounts the latest disk snapshot.

Deploy a multi-region active-active deployment using regional MIGs and Cloud Spanner with synchronous cross-region replication.

Configure an active/passive warm standby architecture with a primary VM and an idle standby VM in a secondary zone, using Alias IP addresses to perform floating IP failover.

Deploy a static site failover pattern hosted on Cloud Storage behind Cloud CDN, configured to serve maintenance pages during backend outages.

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Cold Dr Pattern Managed Instance Group

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