Google Cloud Digital Leader Practice Exam

A travel company is in the early stages of developing a new application and wants to test it on a variety of configurations. What cloud computing option should they use?

1. Containers

2. A local development environment

3. Colocation

4. Virtual machine instances

The correct answer is: Virtual machine instances

The travel company should consider using virtual machine instances for testing their new application on various configurations. Virtual machines allow for the creation of isolated environments, which can be configured with different operating systems, software applications, and hardware specifications easily. This flexibility makes it ideal for testing because the company can quickly spin up different VMs, configure them according to their requirements, and tear them down afterward without affecting other environments or application deployments. With virtual machine instances, the team can simulate real-world production scenarios and load testings, which is particularly beneficial when evaluating how their application performs across different setups. This cloud computing option also provides scalability, allowing the company to adjust resources as needed without significant upfront hardware investments. While containers could also be a consideration for flexibility and efficiency, they typically require a certain level of familiarity with container orchestration and are more suited for microservices architectures. A local development environment may lack the breadth of resources and configurations available in the cloud, making it less suitable for comprehensive testing. Colocation, on the other hand, involves physical deployment and management of hardware in a third-party facility, which is less agile compared to virtual machine instances and could lead to higher costs and longer deployment times.