A retailer wants a fully managed service that reads a continuous stream of clickstream events, applies windowed aggregations, and writes the results to BigQuery. Which service fits?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed runner for Apache Beam pipelines. It handles bounded batch data and unbounded streaming data, supports windowing and aggregation, and provisions and scales workers automatically. Pub/Sub can deliver the events into the pipeline, and the pipeline writes results to BigQuery through a sink. The other services each solve a different problem and do not run stream transformations.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Storage Transfer Service moves objects from external sources into Cloud Storage on a schedule. It does not apply windowed aggregations to events as they arrive.
- C. Looker Studio is a visualization tool that reads from BigQuery. It does not ingest or transform events, so it cannot compute the aggregations.
- D. Bigtable is a wide-column store for low-latency reads and writes. It does not run transformation pipelines, so it cannot perform windowed processing by itself.