You are designing a solution for a startup that needs to handle variable traffic patterns. Which GCP service provides automatic scaling based on demand?

Correct answer: Cloud Run

Cloud Run is the correct answer because it is a fully managed serverless container platform that automatically scales from zero to thousands of instances based on incoming request traffic, making it ideal for variable or unpredictable workloads without any manual intervention. Option A (Cloud SQL) is a managed relational database service and does not provide application-level autoscaling for variable traffic. Option B (Compute Engine with Manual Scaling) requires administrators to manually provision and adjust VM capacity, which is the opposite of automatic demand-based scaling. Option C (Cloud Storage) is an object storage service and is not a compute platform that handles application traffic scaling.