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. Mountkirk Games wants to migrate from their current analytics and statistics reporting model to one that meets their technical requirements on Google Cloud Platform.
Which two steps should be part of their migration plan? (Choose two.)

Case Study: 6 - TerramEarth
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.
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 and Windows-based systems that reside in a single U.S. west coast based data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, 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.
- Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use their equipment to 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.
Technical Requirements
- Expand beyond a single datacenter to decrease latency to the American Midwest and east
coast.
- Create a backup strategy.
- Increase security of data transfer from equipment to the datacenter.
- Improve data in the data warehouse.
- Use customer and equipment data to anticipate customer needs.
Application 1: Data ingest
A custom Python application reads uploaded datafiles from a single server, writes to the data warehouse.
Compute:
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 10 TB local HDD storage
Application 2: Reporting
An off the shelf application that business analysts use to run a daily report to see what equipment needs repair. Only 2 analysts of a team of 10 (5 west coast, 5 east coast) can connect to the reporting application at a time.
Compute:
- Off the shelf application. License tied to number of physical CPUs
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 500 GB HDD
Data warehouse:
- A single PostgreSQL server
- RedHat Linux
- 64 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 6TB HDD in RAID 0
Executive Statement
Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process, with our ability to build better vehicles for lower 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. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
A new architecture that writes all incoming data to BigQuery has been introduced. You notice that the data is dirty, and want to ensure data quality on an automated daily basis while managing cost.
What should you do?

You are using Cloud Shell and need to install a custom utility for use in a few weeks. Where can you store the file so it is in the default execution path and persists across sessions?

You are managing several internal applications that are deployed on Compute Engine. Business users inform you that an application has become very slow over the past few days.
You want to find the underlying cause in order to solve the problem. What should you do first?

You are developing an application using different microservices that should remain internal to the cluster. You want to be able to configure each microservice with a specific number of replicas.
You also want to be able to address a specific microservice from any other microservice in a uniform way, regardless of the number of replicas the microservice scales to. You need to implement this solution on Google Kubernetes Engine. What should you do?