Google Cloud Digital Leader Practice Exam

Which feature of Google Cloud supports automated healing of application instances?

1. Load balancing

2. Auto-scaling

3. Stackdriver

4. Instance groups

The correct answer is: Instance groups

The feature of Google Cloud that supports automated healing of application instances is instance groups. Instance groups are essentially collections of virtual machine (VM) instances that can be managed as a single entity. They provide several benefits, including the ability to automatically replace unhealthy instances. When an instance in an instance group fails or becomes unhealthy, the instance group manager detects this issue and can automatically recreate that instance. This ensures high availability and reliability for applications, as it minimizes downtime by promptly replacing any instances that are not functioning properly. This self-healing capability is particularly valuable for applications requiring continuous uptime and minimizes the need for manual intervention. While load balancing can help distribute traffic among healthy instances and auto-scaling adjusts the number of instances based on demand, these features do not directly perform healing actions on unhealthy instances. Stackdriver, now part of Google Cloud's Operations suite, provides monitoring and logging services but does not inherently manage instance health or perform automated healing actions as instance groups do.