After a 10x surge, your app sees many Cloud Storage HTTP 429 errors and becomes unstable. Implement a fix now and a long-term solution so the app remains stable under future load increases. What should you do?

The correct answer is to implement a retry strategy with exponential backoff for requests that receive HTTP 429 errors. HTTP 429 errors indicate rate limiting, meaning the application is sending too many requests to Cloud Storage in a given timeframe. Exponential backoff is a standard and effective strategy for handling rate limits by retrying failed requests with progressively longer delays, preventing further overwhelming of the service and allowing it to recover. This provides an immediate fix and a robust long-term solution for handling transient rate limits and future load increases. Optimizing application code to reduce unnecessary calls is a good practice but may not be immediately feasible or sufficient for a sudden 10x surge. Compressing media reduces data transfer but doesn't directly address the rate of API calls. Migrating data to Firestore is an architectural change that is not a quick fix and Firestore is not optimized for large binary objects like videos and images.