Jeff’s Insights #
“Unlike generic exam dumps, Jeff’s Insights is designed to make you think like a Real-World Production Architect. We dissect this scenario by analyzing the strategic trade-offs required to balance operational reliability, security, and long-term cost across multi-service deployments.”
The Architecture Drill (Simulated Question) #
Scenario #
RetailWave Inc., a mid-sized e-commerce company, is planning to migrate their legacy three-tier web application from an on-premises data center to Google Cloud. The current architecture consists of:
- Web tier: Apache web servers running on physical machines
- Application tier: Tomcat application servers on virtual machines
- Database tier: A MySQL database cluster handling transactional data
The CFO has requested a detailed cost projection for running this workload on Google Cloud before approving the migration budget. The infrastructure team needs to provide an estimated monthly cost that accounts for Compute Engine instances (to replace the web and application servers) and Cloud SQL (to replace the on-premises MySQL cluster).
The Requirement: #
Create an accurate, defensible cost estimate for migrating the three-tier application to Google Cloud infrastructure, specifically using Compute Engine instances and Cloud SQL.
The Options #
- A) Create a Google spreadsheet with multiple Google Cloud resource combinations. On a separate sheet, import the current Google Cloud prices and use these prices for the calculations within formulas.
- B) Use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator and select the Cloud Operations template to define your web application with as much detail as possible.
- C) Implement a similar architecture on Google Cloud, and run a reasonable load test on a smaller scale. Check the billing information, and calculate the estimated costs based on the real load your system usually handles.
- D) Use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to determine the cost of every Google Cloud resource you expect to use. Use similar size instances for the web server, and use your current on-premises machines as a comparison for Cloud SQL.
Correct Answer #
Option D.
The Architect’s Analysis #
Correct Answer #
Option D.
The Winning Logic #
This solution represents the optimal balance between accuracy, effort, and Google Cloud best practices for pre-migration cost estimation:
-
Official Tool Usage: The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is the authoritative source maintained by Google, ensuring:
- Real-time pricing accuracy across all regions
- Inclusion of sustained use discounts (SUDs) and committed use discounts (CUDs)
- Automatic updates when pricing changes
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Right-Sizing Methodology: The approach of comparing on-premises machine specifications to GCP instance types follows the “Lift-and-Shift” baseline principle—start with equivalent capacity, then optimize post-migration.
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Comprehensive Resource Coverage: The strategy explicitly calls for estimating “every Google Cloud resource,” which aligns with the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) mindset required for cloud financial planning.
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Zero Production Risk: Unlike Option C, this doesn’t require provisioning actual resources, avoiding:
- Premature cloud spending
- Security configuration overhead for test environments
- Potential production impact from experimental workloads
The Trap (Distractor Analysis) #
Why not Option A? #
The Manual Maintenance Anti-Pattern
- Pricing Drift Risk: GCP announces pricing changes quarterly. A static spreadsheet becomes outdated within weeks, leading to budget variance.
- Human Error Surface: Manual formula construction is prone to mistakes (wrong region pricing, missing egress costs, incorrect disk IOPS calculations).
- Not Auditable: Lacks the shareable estimate URL feature that the Pricing Calculator provides for stakeholder review.
- Violates DRY Principle: You’re rebuilding functionality that Google already provides and maintains.
ACE Exam Trap: This tests whether you understand that managed tools reduce operational toil—a core Cloud Operations principle.
Why not Option B? #
The Template Misunderstanding
- Wrong Tool for the Job: The “Cloud Operations template” (if such exists) is designed for observability stack estimation (Cloud Monitoring, Logging, Trace), not infrastructure sizing.
- Template Rigidity: Pre-built templates make assumptions about architecture patterns that may not match your three-tier application (e.g., serverless vs. VM-based).
- Lack of Customization: The question explicitly states you need to estimate specific resources (Compute Engine + Cloud SQL), requiring granular input, not a template.
ACE Exam Trap: This distractor tests whether you confuse convenience (templates) with precision (custom estimation).
Why not Option C? #
The Premature Optimization Fallacy
While this approach provides the most accurate cost data, it’s operationally inefficient for pre-migration estimation:
- Upfront Cost: You pay for test infrastructure before budget approval—violating the “estimate before spend” principle of cloud financial governance.
- Time-to-Insight: Implementing architecture, configuring security (VPC, firewall rules, IAM), running load tests, and analyzing billing data takes weeks. The Pricing Calculator delivers estimates in minutes.
- Scope Creep: “Reasonable load test” is subjective—you risk over-engineering the test environment or under-representing production scale.
- Operational Overhead: Requires DevOps resources to set up monitoring, testing tools (e.g., JMeter, Locust), and teardown procedures.
Real-World Context: This approach is appropriate for post-migration optimization (right-sizing existing workloads), not initial budgeting.
ACE Exam Trap: Google tests whether you can distinguish between planning-phase tools (Pricing Calculator) and optimization-phase tools (billing analysis + profiling).
The Architect Blueprint #
Diagram Note: The flow demonstrates the estimating-before-provisioning pattern—inventory on-premises resources, map to GCP equivalents, input into the Pricing Calculator, and generate actionable cost projections for stakeholder decision-making.
Real-World Application (Practitioner Insight) #
Exam Rule #
“For the ACE exam, always choose the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator when the question asks for cost estimation before migration. Choose billing analysis/reports when optimizing existing GCP resources.”
Real World #
“In production migrations, we use a three-phase cost strategy:
- Phase 1 (Pre-Migration): Pricing Calculator for budget approval
- Phase 2 (Pilot Migration): Deploy 10% of workload, monitor actual costs for 2 billing cycles, validate estimates
- Phase 3 (Optimization): Use Cloud Billing reports + Recommender API to right-size instances and apply committed use discounts
The Pricing Calculator gets you budget approval, but continuous FinOps (cost anomaly detection, unused resource cleanup) keeps you within budget. For RetailWave’s scenario, we’d also factor in:
- Network egress costs (often overlooked—can be 15-20% of total cost for high-traffic e-commerce)
- Cloud SQL backup storage (automatic daily backups count toward storage costs)
- Persistent disk snapshot strategy (retention policy impacts long-term storage costs)
A common mistake is using the Pricing Calculator’s default settings. For example:
- Compute Engine: Enable ‘Committed Use Discount’ if you know the workload is stable (can save 57% vs. on-demand)
- Cloud SQL: Choose the correct edition (Enterprise vs. Enterprise Plus)—the latter includes Point-in-Time Recovery, which affects pricing
- Region selection: Costs vary significantly (e.g.,
us-central1vs.asia-southeast1)—choose based on user latency requirements, not just price.”
Disclaimer
This is a study note based on simulated scenarios for the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) exam. It is not an official question from Google Cloud.