A critical Compute Engine VM needs regular boot-disk backups with fast restore and automatic retention cleanup following Google best practices. What should you implement?

Creating a snapshot schedule directly addresses the need for regular boot-disk backups with automatic retention cleanup. Google Cloud snapshot schedules are designed for this purpose, offering automated, incremental backups and policy-based deletion, which aligns with best practices for data protection and cost management. Creating a Cloud Function to create an instance template is incorrect because instance templates are for creating new instances, not for backing up existing disk data. Creating a cron job using gcloud to create a new disk from the boot disk is less efficient and lacks built-in retention policies compared to snapshot schedules. Creating a Cloud Task that creates an image and exports it to Cloud Storage is also less ideal; while images can be used for backups, snapshots are specifically optimized for fast, incremental disk backups and restores, and Cloud Tasks are for asynchronous task execution, not direct backup management.