Your solution is producing performance bugs in production that you did not see in staging and test environments.
You want to adjust your test and deployment procedures to avoid this problem in the future.
What should you do?

Case Study: 9 - Helicopter Racing League
Company overview
Helicopter Racing League (HRL) is a global sports league for competitive helicopter racing. Each year HRL holds the world championship and several regional league competitions where teams compete to earn a spot in the world championship. HRL offers a paid service to stream the races all over the world with live telemetry and predictions throughout each race.
Solution concept
HRL wants to migrate their existing service to a new platform to expand their use of managed AI and ML services to facilitate race predictions. Additionally, as new fans engage with the sport, particularly in emerging regions, they want to move the serving of their content, both real-time and recorded, closer to their users.
Existing technical environment
HRL is a public cloud-first company; the core of their mission-critical applications runs on their current public cloud provider. Video recording and editing is performed at the race tracks, and the content is encoded and transcoded, where needed, in the cloud. Enterprise-grade connectivity and local compute is provided by truck-mounted mobile data centers. Their race prediction services are hosted exclusively on their existing public cloud provider. Their existing technical environment is as follows:
- Existing content is stored in an object storage service on their existing public cloud provider.
- Video encoding and transcoding is performed on VMs created for each job.
- Race predictions are performed using TensorFlow running on VMs in the current public cloud
provider.
Business requirements
HRL's owners want to expand their predictive capabilities and reduce latency for their viewers in emerging markets. Their requirements are:
- Support ability to expose the predictive models to partners.
- Increase predictive capabilities during and before races:
*Race results
*Mechanical failures
*Crowd sentiment
- Increase telemetry and create additional insights.
- Measure fan engagement with new predictions.
- Enhance global availability and quality of the broadcasts.
- Increase the number of concurrent viewers.
- Minimize operational complexity.
- Ensure compliance with regulations.
- Create a merchandising revenue stream.
Technical requirements
- Maintain or increase prediction throughput and accuracy.
- Reduce viewer latency.
- Increase transcoding performance.
- Create real-time analytics of viewer consumption patterns and engagement.
- Create a data mart to enable processing of large volumes of race data.
Executive statement
Our CEO, S. Hawke, wants to bring high-adrenaline racing to fans all around the world. We listen to our fans, and they want enhanced video streams that include predictions of events within the race (e.g., overtaking). Our current platform allows us to predict race outcomes but lacks the facility to support real-time predictions during races and the capacity to process season-long results.
For this question, refer to the Helicopter Racing League (HRL) case study. Your team is in charge of creating a payment card data vault for card numbers used to bill tens of thousands of viewers, merchandise consumers, and season ticket holders. You need to implement a custom card tokenization service that meets the following requirements:
- It must provide low latency at minimal cost.
- It must be able to identify duplicate credit cards and must not store plaintext card numbers.
- It should support annual key rotation.
Which storage approach should you adopt for your tokenization service?

Your company wants to start using Google Cloud resources but wants to retain their on-premises Active Directory domain controller for identity management. What should you do?

Case Study: 12 - Altostrat Media
Company Overview
Altostrat is a prominent player in the media industry, with an extensive collection of audio and video content that comprises podcasts, interviews, news broadcasts, and documentaries. Their success in delivering premium content to a diverse audience requires a content management system that can keep pace with the dynamic media landscape.
Solution Concept
Altostrat seeks to modernize its content management and user engagement strategies using Google Cloud's generative AI. They want a platform that empowers customers with personalized recommendations, natural language interactions and seamless self-service support.
Simultaneously, they want to drive revenue growth through dynamic pricing targeted marketing, and personalized product suggestions.
The seamless integration of AI-powered tools into the existing Google Cloud environment will enable Altostrat to efficiently manage their vast media library, enhance user experiences, and unlock new revenue streams. Google Cloud's generative AI will solidify their leadership in the media industry.
Existing Technical Environment
Altostrat's content management and delivery platform leverages GKE for scalability and high availability, essential for handling their vast media library. Their extensive media library spanning various documents, audio and video formats is stored in Cloud Storage. To gain valuable insights into user behavior, content consumption patterns, and audience demographics, Altostrat leverages BigQuery as their primary data warehouse. Additionally, they use Cloud Run functions for serverless execution of event-driven tasks such as video transcoding metadata extraction, and personalized content recommendations.
While Altostrat has made significant strides in cloud adoption, they also maintain some legacy on- premises systems for specific workflows like content ingestion and archival. These systems are slated for modernization and migration to Google Cloud in the near future. User management and authentication are currently handled through a combination of Google Identity and third-party identity providers. For monitoring and observability, Altostrat relies on a mix of native Google Cloud tools like Cloud Monitoring and open-source solutions like Prometheus, with alerts primarily delivered via email notifications.
Business Requirements
- Accelerate and enhance the reliability of operational workflows across all environments. [Google
Cloud + On-premises]
- Simplify infrastructure management for rapid application deployment.
- Optimize cloud storage costs while maintaining high availability and scalability for media
content.
- Enable natural language interaction with the platform with 24/7 user support.
- Automatically generate concise summaries of media content.
- Extract rich metadata from media assets using NLP and computer vision.
- Detect and filter inappropriate content.
- Analyze media content to identify trends and extract insights.
- Inform content strategy and decision making with data.
Technical Requirements
- Modernize CI/CD for containerized deployments with a centralized management platform.
- Secure, high-performance hybrid cloud connectivity for data ingestion.
- Provide scalable, performant kubernetes environments both on-premises and in the cloud.
- Optimize cloud storage costs for growing media volumes.
- Design AI-powered detection of harmful content.
- Ensure that AI systems are auditable and their decisions can be explained.
- Leverage LLMs and conversational AI for personalized experiences and content virality.
- Develop advanced chatbots with natural language understanding to provide personalized
assistance.
- Automated summarization for diverse media.
Executive Statement
At Altostrat, we are embracing the next frontier of artificial intelligence to revolutionize our content strategy. By harnessing the power of generative AI, we will create an unparalleled user experience by empowering our audience with intelligent toots for content discovery, personalized recommendations, and seamless interaction. Reliability and cost management are our top priorities. This strategic initiative will deepen engagement, foster customer loyalty, and unlock new revenue streams through targeted marketing and tailored content offerings. We see a future where Al-driven innovation is central to our business, leading to greater success for our company and delivering exceptional value to our customers.
For this question, refer to the Altostrat Media case study. Altostrat is concerned about sophisticated, multi-vector Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks targeting various layers of their infrastructure. DDoS attacks could potentially disrupt video streaming and cause financial losses. You need to mitigate this risk. What should you do?

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.
You want to ensure Dress4Win's sales and tax records remain available for infrequent viewing by auditors for at least 10 years.
Cost optimization is your top priority.
Which cloud services should you choose?