Case Study: 7 - Mountkirk Games
Company Overview
Mountkirk Games makes online, session-based, multiplayer games for mobile platforms. They build all of their games using some server-side integration. Historically, they have used cloud providers to lease physical servers.
Due to the unexpected popularity of some of their games, they have had problems scaling their global audience, application servers, MySQL databases, and analytics tools.
Their current model is to write game statistics to files and send them through an ETL tool that loads them into a centralized MySQL database for reporting.
Solution Concept
Mountkirk Games is building a new game, which they expect to be very popular. They plan to deploy the game's backend on Google Compute Engine so they can capture streaming metrics, run intensive analytics, and take advantage of its autoscaling server environment and integrate with a managed NoSQL database.
Business Requirements
Increase to a global footprint.

Improve uptime - downtime is loss of players.

Increase efficiency of the cloud resources we use.

Reduce latency to all customers.

Technical Requirements
Requirements for Game Backend Platform
Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.

Connect to a transactional database service to manage user profiles and game state.

Store game activity in a timeseries database service for future analysis.

As the system scales, ensure that data is not lost due to processing backlogs.

Run hardened Linux distro.

Requirements for Game Analytics Platform
Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity

Process incoming data on the fly directly from the game servers

Process data that arrives late because of slow mobile networks

Allow queries to access at least 10 TB of historical data

Process files that are regularly uploaded by users' mobile devices

Executive Statement
Our last successful game did not scale well with our previous cloud provider, resulting in lower user adoption and affecting the game's reputation. Our investors want more key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the speed and stability of the game, as well as other metrics that provide deeper insight into usage patterns so we can adapt the game to target users.
Additionally, our current technology stack cannot provide the scale we need, so we want to replace MySQL and move to an environment that provides autoscaling, low latency load balancing, and frees us up from managing physical servers.
For this question, refer to the Mountkirk Games case study. You are in charge of the new Game Backend Platform architecture. The game communicates with the backend over a REST API.
You want to follow Google-recommended practices. How should you design the backend?

You deploy your custom java application to google app engine.
It fails to deploy and gives you the following stack trace:

Case Study: 4 - Dress4Win
Company Overview
Dress4win is a web-based company that helps their users organize and manage their personal wardrobe using a website and mobile application. The company also cultivates an active social network that connects their users with designers and retailers. They monetize their services through advertising, e-commerce, referrals, and a freemium app model.
Company Background
Dress4win's application has grown from a few servers in the founder's garage to several hundred servers and appliances in a colocated data center. However, the capacity of their infrastructure is now insufficient for the application's rapid growth. Because of this growth and the company's desire to innovate faster, Dress4win is committing to a full migration to a public cloud.
Solution Concept
For the first phase of their migration to the cloud, Dress4win is considering moving their development and test environments. They are also considering building a disaster recovery site, because their current infrastructure is at a single location. They are not sure which components of their architecture they can migrate as is and which components they need to change before migrating them.
Existing Technical Environment
The Dress4win application is served out of a single data center location.
Databases:
MySQL - user data, inventory, static data
* Redis - metadata, social graph, caching
* Application servers:
Tomcat - Java micro-services
* Nginx - static content
* Apache Beam - Batch processing
* Storage appliances:
iSCSI for VM hosts
* Fiber channel SAN - MySQL databases
* NAS - image storage, logs, backups
* Apache Hadoop/Spark servers:
Data analysis
* Real-time trending calculations
* MQ servers:
Messaging
* Social notifications
* Events
* Miscellaneous servers:
Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts, security scanners
* Business Requirements
* Build a reliable and reproducible environment with scaled parity of production. Improve security by defining and adhering to a set of security and Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices for cloud.
Improve business agility and speed of innovation through rapid provisioning of new resources.
Analyze and optimize architecture for performance in the cloud. Migrate fully to the cloud if all other requirements are met.
Technical Requirements
Evaluate and choose an automation framework for provisioning resources in cloud. Support failover of the production environment to cloud during an emergency. Identify production services that can migrate to cloud to save capacity.
Use managed services whenever possible.
Encrypt data on the wire and at rest.
Support multiple VPN connections between the production data center and cloud environment.
CEO Statement
Our investors are concerned about our ability to scale and contain costs with our current infrastructure. They are also concerned that a new competitor could use a public cloud platform to offset their up-front investment and freeing them to focus on developing better features.
CTO Statement
We have invested heavily in the current infrastructure, but much of the equipment is approaching the end of its useful life. We are consistently waiting weeks for new gear to be racked before we can start new projects. Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle.
CFO Statement
Our capital expenditure is now exceeding our quarterly projections. Migrating to the cloud will likely cause an initial increase in spending, but we expect to fully transition before our next hardware refresh cycle. Our total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis over the next 5 years puts a cloud strategy between 30 to 50% lower than our current model.
The current Dress4win system architecture has high latency to some customers because it is located in one data center.
As of a future evaluation and optimizing for performance in the cloud, Dresss4win wants to distribute its system architecture to multiple locations when Google cloud platform.
Which approach should they use?

You are working at a financial institution that stores mortgage loan approval documents on Cloud Storage.
Any change to these approval documents must be uploaded as a separate approval file, so you want to ensure that these documents cannot be deleted or overwritten for the next 5 years. What should you do?

Your company's user-feedback portal comprises a standard LAMP stack replicated across two zones. It is deployed in the us-central1 region and uses autoscaled managed instance groups on all layers, except the database. Currently, only a small group of select customers have access to the portal. The portal meets a
99.99% availability SLA under these conditions However next quarter, your company will be making the portal available to all users, including unauthenticated users. You need to develop a resiliency testing strategy to ensure the system maintains the SLA once they introduce additional user load. What should you do?