Question 96
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.
Dress4Win has asked you for advice on how to migrate their on-premises MySQL deployment to the cloud. They want to minimize downtime and performance impact to their on-premises solution during the migration. Which approach should you recommend?
Question 97
Your operations team currently stores 10 TB of data m an object storage service from a third-party provider.
They want to move this data to a Cloud Storage bucket as quickly as possible, following Google- recommended practices. They want to minimize the cost of this data migration. When approach should they use?
Question 98
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 stores a large library of media content, including sensitive interviews and documentaries, in Cloud Storage. They are concerned about the confidentiality of this content and want to protect it from unauthorized access. You need to implement a Google-recommended solution that is easy to integrate and provides Altostrat with control and auditability of the encryption keys. What should you do?
Question 99
Your company has a support ticketing solution that uses App Engine Standard. The project that contains the App Engine application already has a Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) network fully connected to the company's on-premises environment through a Cloud VPN tunnel. You want to enable App Engine application to communicate with a database that is running in the company's on-premises environment. What should you do?
Question 100
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 you to design a way to test the analytics platform's resilience to changes in mobile network latency.
What should you do?