Your company uses Bigtable for a user-facing application that displays a low-latency real-time dashboard. You need to recommend the optimal storage type for this read-intensive database. What should you do?

The application requires low-latency reads for a real-time, user-facing dashboard. Google Cloud Bigtable offers two storage types: Solid-State Drives (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD). SSD storage is engineered for high-performance workloads that are sensitive to latency, providing significantly faster random reads and more predictable performance than HDD. Given the read-intensive and real-time nature of the application, SSD is the optimal choice to meet the low-latency requirement and ensure a responsive user experience.

B. Splitting the instance is a scaling strategy to handle more requests per second, not a storage type selection to reduce the latency of individual reads.
C. Hard disk drives (HDD) are designed for high-throughput, batch-oriented workloads that are not latency-sensitive, making them unsuitable for a real-time dashboard.
D. A Bigtable cluster cannot have mixed storage types. When creating a cluster, you must choose either SSD or HDD for all nodes within that cluster.

1. Google Cloud Documentation, Bigtable: Choosing between SSD and HDD storage.

Reference: Under the section "SSD storage," the documentation states, "SSD storage is the best choice for most workloads, especially those that are in the serving path of a user-facing application or a high-throughput data processing pipeline that is sensitive to latency." This directly supports the choice of SSD for the described scenario.

Reference: Under the section "HDD storage," it states, "HDD storage is a good choice for batch workloads that are not latency-sensitive... If your workload is in the serving path of an application, use SSD storage." This confirms that HDD is the incorrect choice.

2. Google Cloud Documentation, Bigtable: Create an instance.

Reference: In the "Create an instance" guide, Step 6 ("Configure the first cluster") requires the user to "Choose a storage type for the cluster's nodes: SSD or HDD." This confirms that a choice must be made for the entire cluster and that mixed types are not an option.