"Custom images are more deterministic and start more quickly than instances with startup scripts. However, startup scripts are more flexible and let you update the apps and settings in your instances more easily." https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-templates/create-instance-templates#using_custom_or_public_images_in_your_instance_templates

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/data-lifecycle-cloud-platform
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/designing-connected-vehicle-platform

Relational databases were not designed to cope with the scale and agility challenges that face modern applications, nor were they built to take advantage of the commodity storage and processing power available today.
NoSQL fits well for:
Incorrect Answers:
D: The Blobstore API allows your application to serve data objects, called blobs, that are much larger than the size allowed for objects in the Datastore service. Blobs are useful for serving large files, such as video or image files, and for allowing users to upload large data files.

Binary Authorization to ensure only verified containers are deployed To ensure deployment are secure and and consistent, automatically scan images for vulnerabilities with container analysis (https://cloud.google.com/docs/ci-cd/overview?hl=en&skip_cache=true)

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-ssh D: Handling "Unable to connect on port 22" error message Possible causes include:
There is no firewall rule allowing SSH access on the port. SSH access on port 22 is enabled on all Compute Engine instances by default. If you have disabled access, SSH from the Browser will not work. If you run sshd on a port other than 22, you need to enable the access to that port with a custom firewall rule.
The firewall rule allowing SSH access is enabled, but is not configured to allow connections from GCP Console services. Source IP addresses for browser-based SSH sessions are dynamically allocated by GCP Console and can vary from session to session.
Reference:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ssh-in-browser
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ssh-in-browser
Topic 5, 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.