You want to minimize costs for development and testing environments. Which approach should you use?

Correct answer: Use preemptible VMs and committed use discounts

Option C is correct because preemptible VMs (now called Spot VMs in Google Cloud) offer up to 91% savings over standard on-demand pricing and are ideal for interruptible dev and test workloads, while committed use discounts provide additional savings for predictable baseline capacity. Option A is incorrect because standard machine types carry full on-demand pricing with no built-in cost reduction for non-production environments. Option B is incorrect because restricting to Compute Engine alone does not address pricing model choices and excludes managed services that may be cheaper for certain workloads. Option D is incorrect because running instances continuously around the clock wastes budget; dev and test environments should be stopped when idle, compounding the savings from preemptible pricing.