You work for an environmental agency in a large city. You are developing a new monitoring platform that will capture air quality readings from thousands of locations in the city. You want the air quality reading devices to send and receive their data payload to the newly created RESTful backend systems every minute by using a curl command. The backend systems are running in a single cloud region and are using Premium Tier networking. You need to connect the devices to the backend while minimizing the daily average latency, measured by using Time to First Byte (TTFB). How should you build this service?

You are using Cloud Build build to promote a Docker image to Development, Test, and Production environments. You need to ensure that the same Docker image is deployed to each of these environments.
How should you identify the Docker image in your build?

Case Study 1 - HipLocal
Company Overview
HipLocal is a community application designed to facilitate communication between people in close proximity. It is used for event planning and organizing sporting events, and for businesses to connect with their local communities. HipLocal launched recently in a few neighborhoods in Dallas and is rapidly growing into a global phenomenon. Its unique style of hyper-local community communication and business outreach is in demand around the world.
Executive Statement
We are the number one local community app; it's time to take our local community services global. Our venture capital investors want to see rapid growth and the same great experience for new local and virtual communities that come online, whether their members are 10 or 10000 miles away from each other.
Solution Concept
HipLocal wants to expand their existing service, with updated functionality, in new regions to better serve their global customers. They want to hire and train a new team to support these regions in their time zones. They will need to ensure that the application scales smoothly and provides clear uptime data.
Existing Technical Environment
HipLocal's environment is a mix of on-premises hardware and infrastructure running in Google Cloud Platform. The HipLocal team understands their application well, but has limited experience in global scale applications. Their existing technical environment is as follows:
* Existing APIs run on Compute Engine virtual machine instances hosted in GCP.
* State is stored in a single instance MySQL database in GCP.
* Data is exported to an on-premises Teradata/Vertica data warehouse.
* Data analytics is performed in an on-premises Hadoop environment.
* The application has no logging.
* There are basic indicators of uptime; alerts are frequently fired when the APIs are unresponsive.
Business Requirements
HipLocal's investors want to expand their footprint and support the increase in demand they are seeing. Their requirements are:
* Expand availability of the application to new regions.
* Increase the number of concurrent users that can be supported.
* Ensure a consistent experience for users when they travel to different regions.
* Obtain user activity metrics to better understand how to monetize their product.
* Ensure compliance with regulations in the new regions (for example, GDPR).
* Reduce infrastructure management time and cost.
* Adopt the Google-recommended practices for cloud computing.
Technical Requirements
* The application and backend must provide usage metrics and monitoring.
* APIs require strong authentication and authorization.
* Logging must be increased, and data should be stored in a cloud analytics platform.
* Move to serverless architecture to facilitate elastic scaling.
* Provide authorized access to internal apps in a secure manner.
Which service should HipLocal use to enable access to internal apps?

Your company's product team has a new requirement based on customer demand to autoscale your stateless and distributed service running in a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) duster. You want to find a solution that minimizes changes because this feature will go live in two weeks.
What should you do?

Your company manages an application that captures stock data in an internal database. You need to create an API that provides real-time stock data to users. You want to return stock data to users as quickly as possible, and you want your solution to be highly scalable. What should you do?