Professional-Cloud-Architect Exam Question 21
Case Study: 2 - TerramEarth Case Study
Company Overview
TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries: About
80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.
Company Background
TerramEarth formed in 1946, when several small, family owned companies combined to retool after World War II. The company cares about their employees and customers and considers them to be extended members of their family.
TerramEarth is proud of their ability to innovate on their core products and find new markets as their customers' needs change. For the past 20 years trends in the industry have been largely toward increasing productivity by using larger vehicles with a human operator.
Solution Concept
There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second.
Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced.
The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.
Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second, with 22 hours of operation per day.
TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.
Existing Technical Environment
TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux-based systems that reside in a data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, transform and aggregate them, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.
With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.
Business Requirements
- Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week, without
increasing the cost of carrying surplus inventory
- Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use
their equipment IP better position new products and services.
- Have the ability to partner with different companies-especially with
seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural
business-to create compelling joint offerings for their customers
CEO Statement
We have been successful in capitalizing on the trend toward larger vehicles to increase the productivity of our customers. Technological change is occurring rapidly and TerramEarth has taken advantage of connected devices technology to provide our customers with better services, such as our intelligent farming equipment. With this technology, we have been able to increase farmers' yields by 25%, by using past trends to adjust how our vehicles operate. These advances have led to the rapid growth of our agricultural product line, which we expect will generate 50% of our revenues by 2020.
CTO Statement
Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process with our ability to build better vehicles for tower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. Unfortunately, our CEO doesn't take technology obsolescence seriously and he considers the many new companies in our industry to be niche players. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
Which of TerramEarth's legacy enterprise processes will experience significant change as a result of increased Google Cloud Platform adoption.
Company Overview
TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries: About
80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.
Company Background
TerramEarth formed in 1946, when several small, family owned companies combined to retool after World War II. The company cares about their employees and customers and considers them to be extended members of their family.
TerramEarth is proud of their ability to innovate on their core products and find new markets as their customers' needs change. For the past 20 years trends in the industry have been largely toward increasing productivity by using larger vehicles with a human operator.
Solution Concept
There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second.
Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced.
The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.
Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second, with 22 hours of operation per day.
TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.
Existing Technical Environment
TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux-based systems that reside in a data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, transform and aggregate them, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.
With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.
Business Requirements
- Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week, without
increasing the cost of carrying surplus inventory
- Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use
their equipment IP better position new products and services.
- Have the ability to partner with different companies-especially with
seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural
business-to create compelling joint offerings for their customers
CEO Statement
We have been successful in capitalizing on the trend toward larger vehicles to increase the productivity of our customers. Technological change is occurring rapidly and TerramEarth has taken advantage of connected devices technology to provide our customers with better services, such as our intelligent farming equipment. With this technology, we have been able to increase farmers' yields by 25%, by using past trends to adjust how our vehicles operate. These advances have led to the rapid growth of our agricultural product line, which we expect will generate 50% of our revenues by 2020.
CTO Statement
Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process with our ability to build better vehicles for tower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. Unfortunately, our CEO doesn't take technology obsolescence seriously and he considers the many new companies in our industry to be niche players. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
Which of TerramEarth's legacy enterprise processes will experience significant change as a result of increased Google Cloud Platform adoption.
Professional-Cloud-Architect Exam Question 22
Case Study: 1 - Mountkirk Games Case Study
Company Overview
Mountkirk Games makes online, session-based. multiplayer games for the most popular mobile platforms.
Company Background
Mountkirk Games builds all of their games with some server-side integration and has historically used cloud providers to lease physical servers. A few of their games were more popular than expected, and they had problems scaling their application servers, MySQL databases, and analytics tools.
Mountkirk's 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.
Technical Requirements
Requirements for Game Backend Platform
1. Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
2. Connect to a managed NoSQL database service.
3. Run customized Linx distro.
Requirements for Game Analytics Platform
1. Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
2. Process incoming data on the fly directly from the game servers.
3. Process data that arrives late because of slow mobile networks.
4. Allow SQL queries to access at least 10 TB of historical data.
5. Process files that are regularly uploaded by users' mobile devices.
6. Use only fully managed services
CEO Statement
Our last successful game did not scale well with our previous cloud provider, resuming 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 gams to target users.
CTO Statement
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.
CFO Statement
We are not capturing enough user demographic data usage metrics, and other KPIs. As a result, we do not engage the right users. We are not confident that our marketing is targeting the right users, and we are not selling enough premium Blast-Ups inside the games, which dramatically impacts our revenue.
For this question, refer to the Mountkirk Games case study. MountKirk Games uses Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine. For the management, it is important to use an open platform, cloud-native, and without vendor lock-ins. But they also need to use advanced APIs of GCP services and want to do it securely using standard methodologies, following Google- recommended practices but above all efficiently with maximum security. Which of the following solutions would you recommend?
Company Overview
Mountkirk Games makes online, session-based. multiplayer games for the most popular mobile platforms.
Company Background
Mountkirk Games builds all of their games with some server-side integration and has historically used cloud providers to lease physical servers. A few of their games were more popular than expected, and they had problems scaling their application servers, MySQL databases, and analytics tools.
Mountkirk's 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.
Technical Requirements
Requirements for Game Backend Platform
1. Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
2. Connect to a managed NoSQL database service.
3. Run customized Linx distro.
Requirements for Game Analytics Platform
1. Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
2. Process incoming data on the fly directly from the game servers.
3. Process data that arrives late because of slow mobile networks.
4. Allow SQL queries to access at least 10 TB of historical data.
5. Process files that are regularly uploaded by users' mobile devices.
6. Use only fully managed services
CEO Statement
Our last successful game did not scale well with our previous cloud provider, resuming 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 gams to target users.
CTO Statement
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.
CFO Statement
We are not capturing enough user demographic data usage metrics, and other KPIs. As a result, we do not engage the right users. We are not confident that our marketing is targeting the right users, and we are not selling enough premium Blast-Ups inside the games, which dramatically impacts our revenue.
For this question, refer to the Mountkirk Games case study. MountKirk Games uses Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine. For the management, it is important to use an open platform, cloud-native, and without vendor lock-ins. But they also need to use advanced APIs of GCP services and want to do it securely using standard methodologies, following Google- recommended practices but above all efficiently with maximum security. Which of the following solutions would you recommend?
Professional-Cloud-Architect Exam Question 23
Your company has just acquired another company, and you have been asked to integrate their existing Google Cloud environment into your company's data center. Upon investigation, you discover that some of the RFC 1918 IP ranges being used in the new company's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) overlap with your data center IP space. What should you do to enable connectivity and make sure that there are no routing conflicts when connectivity is established?
Professional-Cloud-Architect Exam Question 24
Case Study: 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. The application has grown from a few servers in the founder's garage to several hundred servers and appliances in a collocated 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 moving their development and test environments. They are also 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. All servers run Ubuntu LTS v16.04.
Databases:
- MySQL. 1 server for user data, inventory, static data:
- MySQL 5.8
- 8 core CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 2x 5 TB HDD (RAID 1)
- Redis 3 server cluster for metadata, social graph, caching. Each server is:
- Redis 3.2
- 4 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
Compute:
- 40 Web Application servers providing micro-services based APIs and static content.
- Tomcat - Java
- Nginx
- 4 core CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 20 Apache Hadoop/Spark servers:
- Data analysis
- Real-time trending calculations
- 8 core CPUS
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 5 TB HDD (RAID 1)
- 3 RabbitMQ servers for messaging, social notifications, and events:
- 8 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
- Miscellaneous servers:
- Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts, security scanners
- 8 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
Storage appliances:
- iSCSI for VM hosts
- Fiber channel SAN - MySQL databases
- 1 PB total storage; 400 TB available
- NAS - image storage, logs, backups
- 100 TB total storage; 35 TB available
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.
Technical Requirements
- Easily create non-production environment in the cloud.
- Implement an automation framework for provisioning resources in cloud.
- Implement a continuous deployment process for deploying applications to the on-premises
datacenter or cloud.
- Support failover of the production environment to cloud during an emergency.
- Encrypt data on the wire and at rest.
- Support multiple private connections between the production data center and cloud
environment.
Executive Statement
Our investors are concerned about our ability to scale and contain costs with our current infrastructure. They are also concerned that a competitor could use a public cloud platform to offset their up-front investment and free them to focus on developing better features. Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle.
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 for a public cloud strategy achieves a cost reduction between 30% and 50% over our current model.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study. You are responsible for the security of data stored in Cloud Storage for your company, Dress4Win. You have already created a set of Google Groups and assigned the appropriate users to those groups. You should use Google best practices and implement the simplest design to meet the requirements.
Considering Dress4Win's business and technical requirements, what should you do?
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. The application has grown from a few servers in the founder's garage to several hundred servers and appliances in a collocated 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 moving their development and test environments. They are also 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. All servers run Ubuntu LTS v16.04.
Databases:
- MySQL. 1 server for user data, inventory, static data:
- MySQL 5.8
- 8 core CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 2x 5 TB HDD (RAID 1)
- Redis 3 server cluster for metadata, social graph, caching. Each server is:
- Redis 3.2
- 4 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
Compute:
- 40 Web Application servers providing micro-services based APIs and static content.
- Tomcat - Java
- Nginx
- 4 core CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 20 Apache Hadoop/Spark servers:
- Data analysis
- Real-time trending calculations
- 8 core CPUS
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 5 TB HDD (RAID 1)
- 3 RabbitMQ servers for messaging, social notifications, and events:
- 8 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
- Miscellaneous servers:
- Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts, security scanners
- 8 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
Storage appliances:
- iSCSI for VM hosts
- Fiber channel SAN - MySQL databases
- 1 PB total storage; 400 TB available
- NAS - image storage, logs, backups
- 100 TB total storage; 35 TB available
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.
Technical Requirements
- Easily create non-production environment in the cloud.
- Implement an automation framework for provisioning resources in cloud.
- Implement a continuous deployment process for deploying applications to the on-premises
datacenter or cloud.
- Support failover of the production environment to cloud during an emergency.
- Encrypt data on the wire and at rest.
- Support multiple private connections between the production data center and cloud
environment.
Executive Statement
Our investors are concerned about our ability to scale and contain costs with our current infrastructure. They are also concerned that a competitor could use a public cloud platform to offset their up-front investment and free them to focus on developing better features. Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle.
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 for a public cloud strategy achieves a cost reduction between 30% and 50% over our current model.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study. You are responsible for the security of data stored in Cloud Storage for your company, Dress4Win. You have already created a set of Google Groups and assigned the appropriate users to those groups. You should use Google best practices and implement the simplest design to meet the requirements.
Considering Dress4Win's business and technical requirements, what should you do?
Professional-Cloud-Architect Exam Question 25
Case Study: 4 - Dress4Win case study
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.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study.
At Dress4Win, an operations engineer wants to create a tow-cost solution to remotely archive copies of database backup files. The database files are compressed tar files stored in their current data center.
How should he proceed?
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.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study.
At Dress4Win, an operations engineer wants to create a tow-cost solution to remotely archive copies of database backup files. The database files are compressed tar files stored in their current data center.
How should he proceed?