You are in charge of deploying a globally distributed, stateful application that needs strong consistency and automatic failover. Which GCP service can be best utilized to meet these requirements?

*Explanation:* To deploy a globally distributed, stateful application with strong consistency and automatic failover, the most suitable GCP service is **Cloud Spanner** with a multi-region configuration. Cloud Spanner provides strong consistency, automatic failover, and global distribution, making it ideal for such requirements. Options like Cloud SQL (limited in strong consistency for cross-region replicas), Cloud Bigtable (not designed for strong consistency), Google Kubernetes Engine with Cloud Firestore (complex architecture), and App Engine with Cloud SQL (less suited for strong consistency) may not offer the same level of support and features as Cloud Spanner in this context.