Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:
This question requires a solution that excels at large-scale, stateful stream processing with sophisticated windowing and handling of out-of-order data.
Option C is the correct answer because this architecture is perfectly suited for the requirements.
Pub/Sub is the global, scalable ingestion service for continuous event data.
Dataflow, with the Apache Beam programming model, is specifically designed for complex stream processing. It has powerful, built-in support for different windowing strategies (including session windows for sessionization) and sophisticated triggers for handling late-arriving data. Its serverless nature ensures it scales to handle millions of events.
BigQuery is the ideal sink for the processed data, enabling large-scale analytics for the recommendation engine.
Option A is incorrect as Firebase and Cloud Run are more suited for application backends and are not designed for complex, stateful data processing pipelines at this scale.
Option B is incorrect because it describes a batch processing pattern. Using Cloud Storage for ingestion and Dataproc for batch processing would introduce high latency, failing the "low latency" requirement.
Option D is incorrect because Cloud Data Fusion is primarily a batch-oriented ETL/ELT tool, and Cloud SQL is not an analytical data warehouse capable of handling this scale of data for analytics.
Reference (Google Cloud Documentation Concepts):
This is another example of the canonical Pub/Sub -> Dataflow -> BigQuery streaming analytics pattern. The Apache Beam Programming Guide (which is the foundation for Dataflow) extensively covers concepts like Windowing (specifically SessionWindows) and Triggers for handling late data. These features are critical for accurately processing real-world event streams like clickstream data and are core strengths of Dataflow.
