A seed-stage startup with three engineers wants every commit to be built, tested and promoted through staging to production on Google Cloud, with no servers for them to patch. Which pairing is the best fit?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: D
Cloud Build is a fully managed build service that runs tests and builds on triggers from source commits, with no build servers to maintain. Cloud Deploy is the managed continuous delivery service that promotes releases through ordered targets such as staging and production, including GKE and Cloud Run. Together they minimize operational overhead. The other options all require the team to run and patch orchestration software or virtual machines, or they solve a data orchestration problem rather than release delivery.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Jenkins on a managed instance group still needs the team to patch the server, plugins and agents. Custom bash deployment steps add more maintenance, which conflicts with the stated goal.
- B. Cloud Scheduler only triggers jobs on a schedule. It does not build from commits or manage staged promotion, and the VM it runs on still needs patching.
- C. Composer is a managed Airflow service meant for data and workflow orchestration. It is heavier than needed for release pipelines and does not provide native build and delivery stages.