Analysing & Optimising Processes

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming

Company Overview: TechStream Gaming is a global gaming company with 500 employees and $50M annual revenue.
Current Environment: On-premises data centers in US and EU. 200 servers. MySQL databases (5 TB). Peak users: 2M. Cost: $100K/mo.
Business Requirements: Reduce costs by 40%. Support 5x user growth. Launch in APAC, SA, Africa. Improve deployment to daily.
Executive Statements: CEO: 'Scale rapidly.' CFO: 'Max $100K/mo, ROI 18mo.' CTO: 'Limited cloud exp, 99.95% uptime.'
Technical Requirements: <100ms latency globally. Real-time analytics. 5x traffic spikes. EU data residency. DDoS protection. CI/CD.
Constraints: 12-month migration. Max 4-hour downtime. 20 devs (Java/MySQL), 5 ops (limited cloud). Budget $2M.

QUESTION:
How should you design the real-time analytics pipeline for player behavior data?

CASE STUDY: Dress4Win

Company Overview: Dress4Win is a web-based retail company that helps users organize their wardrobes.
Current Environment: Colocated data center. Tomcat app servers, Nginx web servers, MySQL databases, Redis caching. 100TB of image data on SAN.
Business Requirements: Migrate to cloud to handle seasonal spikes (Black Friday). Reduce CapEx. Enable rapid prototyping.
Executive Statements: CEO: 'Innovate faster, stop worrying about servers.' CFO: 'Move to OpEx. Ensure PCI-DSS compliance.' CTO: 'Modernize stack but migrate quickly first.'
Technical Requirements: Secure hybrid connectivity during migration. PCI-DSS compliance. Automated scaling. CI/CD for microservices.
Constraints: Migration must be completed before Q4 holiday season (6 months). Limited budget for refactoring during initial migration.

QUESTION:
For the post-migration modernization phase, the CTO wants to implement CI/CD for new microservices. Which GCP services should you recommend?

CASE STUDY: TerramEarth

Company Overview: TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment. 2 million vehicles in the field.
Current Environment: Vehicles send telemetry via cellular. Processing 100,000 msgs/sec. On-prem Hadoop cluster.
Business Requirements: Predict equipment failure. Reduce warranty costs. Provide fleet dashboard.
Executive Statements: CEO: 'Monetize data.' CFO: 'Storage costs spiraling.' CTO: 'Need scalable ingestion and ML.'
Technical Requirements: Ingest 500,000 msgs/sec. Store petabytes cost-effectively. Train ML models. Real-time anomaly detection.
Constraints: Intermittent connectivity. Strict vehicle authentication.

QUESTION:
Which THREE GCP services should you combine to build the pipeline for real-time anomaly detection and predictive maintenance ML training? (Select THREE)

CASE STUDY: HealthCare360

Company Overview: HealthCare360 provides EHR systems to hospitals in NA and EU.
Current Environment: Isolated on-prem deployments. Fragmented data.
Business Requirements: Centralize EHR in cloud. Enable cross-hospital research. Ensure compliance.
Executive Statements: CEO: 'Transforming to SaaS.' CFO: 'Need cost attribution per tenant.' CSO: 'Zero compromise on HIPAA/GDPR.'
Technical Requirements: Multi-region active-active deployment. Microservices on GKE. End-to-end encryption (CMEK). Strict network perimeters.
Constraints: Zero data loss (RPO=0). RTO < 15 minutes. HIPAA (US) and GDPR (EU) compliance.

QUESTION:
To achieve the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of < 15 minutes in the event of a regional failure, how should traffic be routed?

Your company has a hybrid cloud architecture. You have internal applications running on-premises and on GCP. You want on-premises servers to be able to resolve the DNS names of GCP Compute Engine instances (e.g., myserver.c.myproject.internal). How should you configure Cloud DNS?

You need to back up a 500 GB Persistent Disk attached to a Compute Engine instance. The disk contains a highly active database. You want to minimize the time the database is locked during the backup process. What is the most efficient way to take the backup?

You are managing a fleet of Compute Engine instances in a Managed Instance Group (MIG). The application processes messages from a Cloud Pub/Sub topic. Traffic is highly variable. You want the MIG to scale out when there is a backlog of messages and scale in when the queue is empty. How should you configure the autoscaler?

A microservices application is experiencing high latency. The architecture consists of an API Gateway, an Authentication service, a Business Logic service, and a Database. You need to identify exactly which service is causing the bottleneck. Which TWO GCP observability tools should you use? (Select TWO)

Your organization wants to implement a robust disaster recovery strategy for a critical Cloud SQL database. The database is currently in us-central1. The RPO is 10 minutes, and the RTO is 1 hour. Which THREE configurations are required to achieve this? (Select THREE)

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming. 500 emp, $100M rev. On-prem US/EU, 200 servers, MySQL 5TB. 2M peak users. $100K/mo cost. Req: Cut cost 40%, 5x growth, 3 new regions, daily deploys. CEO: Scale fast. CFO: <$100K/mo, 18mo ROI. CTO: Low cloud skills, 99.95% uptime. Tech: <100ms latency, real-time analytics, 5x spikes, EU data residency, DDoS protection, CI/CD. Constraints: 12mo migration, 4hr downtime, 20 devs (Java/MySQL), 5 ops (no cloud), $2M budget.

Design the real-time analytics pipeline for player behavior.

CASE STUDY: ShopGlobal. Global e-commerce. Monolithic Java on VMware. Oracle RAC (20TB). 10x Black Friday traffic. Req: Microservices, 100% uptime during holidays, personalized recommendations. CEO: Flawless omnichannel. CFO: Predictable spend. CTO: No vendor lock-in, open-source. Tech: Containerize, Global LB, PCI-DSS, async orders, real-time inventory. Constraints: Keep Oracle on-prem for 2 yrs (licensing), low K8s skills, strict security reviews.

Which architecture pattern should you use to implement asynchronous order processing to handle 10x Black Friday traffic spikes?

CASE STUDY: AutoMakers Inc. 1M connected cars, 100GB/day telemetry. Req: Predictive maintenance, real-time driver dashboard, monetize data. CEO: Data is new engine. CFO: Cut 3rd-party IoT costs. CTO: Highly scalable ingest. Tech: MQTT ingest, stream processing, ML models, 7-yr cold storage, handle intermittent connectivity. Constraints: Anonymize data, low vehicle compute, strict analytics budget.

To build and deploy the predictive maintenance ML models with minimal MLOps overhead, which platform should you use?

CASE STUDY: HealthSecure. 50M patient records. Legacy mainframe, on-prem SAN (100TB), .NET portal. Req: Modernize portal, secure hospital sharing, fast audits. CEO: Modern UX. CFO: Automate audits. CISO: Zero breaches. Tech: HIPAA, CMEK, audit logging, API gateway, DR (1h RPO/4h RTO). Constraints: No public DB IPs, Dev/Ops separation, US data only, mainframe stays on-prem via VPN.

To satisfy the CFO's requirement to automate and speed up compliance audits, how should you handle Cloud Audit Logs?

To ensure software supply chain security, your CISO requires that only container images verified by the QA team can be deployed to the production GKE cluster. Which combination of services achieves this?

Your SRE team has defined a Service Level Objective (SLO) of 99.9% availability for a service. Over the last 30 days, the service has experienced 45 minutes of downtime. The error budget is depleted. According to SRE best practices, what should the team do?

You are planning a massive marketing campaign that will require spinning up 5,000 new Compute Engine cores in a single region within 10 minutes. What must you do to ensure this succeeds?

Your microservices application is experiencing high latency. You need to identify which specific function in the code is consuming the most CPU, and how long requests take as they travel between microservices. Which TWO Google Cloud operations tools should you use? (Select TWO)

To improve system resilience, your SRE team wants to implement Chaos Engineering by intentionally injecting HTTP 500 errors and network delays between microservices running on GKE. Which TWO approaches are best suited for this? (Select TWO)

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming

Company Overview:
TechStream Gaming is a global gaming company with 500 employees and $100M in annual revenue. They develop multiplayer online games.

Current Technical Environment:

• On-premises data centers in US and EU
• 200 servers (mix of Windows and Linux)
• MySQL databases (5 TB total)
• Peak concurrent users: 2 million
• Current monthly infrastructure cost: $100K

Business Requirements:

• Reduce infrastructure costs by 40%
• Support 5x user growth over 2 years
• Launch in 3 new regions (APAC, SA, Africa)
• Improve deployment speed (current: 1 week -> target: daily)

Executive Statements:

• CEO: "We need to scale rapidly to compete with larger gaming companies. Cloud migration is critical to our growth strategy."
• CFO: "Cost reduction is paramount. We cannot exceed $60K/month in cloud costs. ROI must be achieved within 18 months."
• CTO: "Our team has limited cloud experience. We need a solution that doesn't require extensive retraining. Reliability is non-negotiable - 99.95% uptime minimum."

Technical Requirements:

• Sub-100ms latency for players globally
• Real-time analytics on player behavior
• Seasonal traffic spikes (5x during holidays)
• DDoS protection
• CI/CD pipeline for daily deployments

Constraints:

• Migration must complete in 12 months
• Cannot exceed 4-hour downtime during cutover
• Development team: 20 engineers (Java, MySQL expertise)
• Operations team: 5 engineers (limited cloud experience)

QUESTION:
How should you address the CTO's concern regarding the operations team's limited cloud experience while ensuring the 12-month migration timeline is met?

CASE STUDY: TrendWear Apparel

Company Overview:
TrendWear Apparel is a global clothing retailer with an e-commerce platform and 500 physical stores.

Current Technical Environment:

• On-premises VMware environment
• Legacy IBM Mainframe for core inventory management
• Monolithic e-commerce application running on VMs

Business Requirements:

• Modernize the e-commerce platform to handle Black Friday (10x normal traffic)
• Unify online and in-store inventory data in real-time
• Avoid major capital expenditure (CapEx) for data center refreshes

Executive Statements:

• CEO: "We need an omnichannel experience. Customers should see accurate store inventory online."
• CFO: "We must shift from CapEx to OpEx. No more buying hardware."
• CTO: "We want to move to microservices, but we cannot retire the mainframe for at least 3 years due to complex legacy dependencies."

Technical Requirements:

• Hybrid architecture connecting GCP and on-premises
• Microservices architecture for the new e-commerce platform
• PCI-DSS compliance for all payment processing
• Consistent management plane across on-prem and cloud

Constraints:

• Mainframe must remain on-premises
• E-commerce migration must be completed before the next holiday season (8 months)

QUESTION:
To ensure the security of the new microservices, the CTO wants to guarantee that only container images built by the official CI/CD pipeline and scanned for vulnerabilities can be deployed to GKE. How should you implement this?

CASE STUDY: CareData Health

Company Overview:
CareData Health is a large healthcare provider network operating 50 hospitals. They manage petabytes of patient records, medical imaging, and telemetry data.

Current Technical Environment:

• Decentralized on-premises data centers at each hospital
• Legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems
• Fragmented data silos preventing holistic patient views

Business Requirements:

• Centralize patient data into a single secure data lake
• Enable machine learning for predictive diagnostics
• Securely share anonymized data with external research partners

Executive Statements:

• CEO: "We must leverage AI to improve patient outcomes and reduce readmission rates."
• CISO: "Zero tolerance for data breaches. Patient data must be encrypted everywhere, and we must prevent any unauthorized data exfiltration."
• DPO (Data Protection Officer): "We must strictly adhere to HIPAA in the US and GDPR for our European patients. Data residency is mandatory."

Technical Requirements:

• End-to-end encryption using keys managed by CareData
• Strict access controls and comprehensive audit logging
• Ingestion of HL7 and FHIR healthcare data formats
• Physical separation of EU and US data

Constraints:

• Highly regulated environment
• Legacy systems cannot be modified, only integrated with

QUESTION:
The DPO mandates physical separation of EU and US data. How should you design the BigQuery architecture to ensure compliance while minimizing operational overhead?

CASE STUDY: AutoMakers Inc

Company Overview:
AutoMakers Inc is a global vehicle manufacturer. They have recently launched a line of connected cars.

Current Technical Environment:

• 1 million connected cars currently on the road
• Cars send telemetry data (speed, engine temp, location) every 5 seconds
• Current on-premises MQTT brokers are crashing under the load

Business Requirements:

• Enable predictive maintenance to alert drivers before parts fail
• Provide real-time fleet tracking for commercial customers
• Support over-the-air (OTA) software updates

Executive Statements:

• CEO: "Data is our new revenue stream. We need to monetize this telemetry data."
• CTO: "We expect to have 10 million connected cars in 3 years. The architecture must scale infinitely without manual intervention."
• CFO: "The cost of ingesting and storing this data must be strictly controlled. We cannot pay for idle capacity."

Technical Requirements:

• Ingest up to 100,000 messages per second
• Low-latency processing for real-time alerts
• Time-series data storage for historical analysis
• Handle variable network connectivity (cars driving through tunnels)

Constraints:

• Strict budget for data ingestion
• Small data engineering team

QUESTION:
The operations team needs to be alerted if the number of unacknowledged messages in the Pub/Sub subscription exceeds 500,000, indicating a processing bottleneck. How should you configure this?

Your organization has adopted Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. The Service Level Objective (SLO) for your e-commerce checkout service is 99.9% availability over a 30-day rolling window. Currently, the service has experienced several outages, and the error budget has been completely exhausted. According to SRE best practices, what action should the team take?

Your company is planning a massive marketing campaign that will launch in 48 hours. The engineering team expects a 20x increase in traffic. The application runs on Compute Engine instances in the us-central1 region. During a load test, the autoscaler failed to provision enough instances, and the logs showed QUOTA_EXCEEDED errors for N2 CPUs. What is the most appropriate action to ensure the campaign's success?

Your team is deploying a major update to a user-facing web application. To minimize risk, you want to route only 5% of the live traffic to the new version. If the error rate remains low, you will gradually increase the traffic to 100%. Which deployment strategy does this describe?

Your SRE team wants to implement Chaos Engineering to test the resilience of a microservices architecture running on GKE. Which TWO practices should the team adopt? (Select TWO)

You are designing a CI/CD pipeline for a GKE-based application. The development team wants to adopt a GitOps methodology. Which TWO tools/services are central to implementing GitOps on Google Cloud? (Select TWO)

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming

Overview: 500 employees, $100M revenue. On-prem US/EU, 200 servers, 5TB MySQL. 2M peak users, $100K/mo cost.
Business: Reduce cost 40%, 5x growth, launch APAC/SA/Africa, daily deployments.
Executives:

• CEO: "Scale rapidly to compete. Cloud is critical."
• CFO: "Cost reduction paramount. Max $100K/mo. ROI in 18 months."
• CTO: "Team has limited cloud experience. 99.95% uptime non-negotiable."
  Tech: <100ms latency globally, real-time analytics, 5x seasonal spikes, EU data residency, DDoS protection, CI/CD.
  Constraints: 12-month migration, 4hr max downtime, 20 devs (Java/MySQL), 5 ops (limited cloud), $2M budget.

How should you address the operations team's limited cloud experience while ensuring the 99.95% uptime requirement?

CASE STUDY: RetailMart

Overview: Global e-commerce, 5,000 employees. Legacy monolith on VMware, 20TB Oracle DB on-prem.
Business: Modernize to microservices, 100% uptime during Black Friday (10x traffic), real-time inventory sync, exit data center in 2 years.
Executives:

• CEO: "Innovate faster to beat online-only competitors."
• CFO: "End hardware CAPEX. Move to pure OPEX."
• CTO: "Break monolith safely. Zero downtime during transition."
  Tech: Migrate off Oracle to open-source, containerize, secure hybrid connectivity during transition, automated scaling.
  Constraints: Zero downtime for storefront, heavy reliance on Oracle stored procedures, all hybrid traffic must be private/encrypted.

To support the CEO's goal to "innovate faster," you need to design a secure CI/CD pipeline for the new microservices. Which architecture should you implement?

CASE STUDY: HealthData Corp

Overview: Healthcare SaaS managing 10PB of sensitive patient records and imaging.
Business: Strict HIPAA/SOC 2 compliance, ransomware protection, secure sharing of anonymized data with researchers, robust DR.
Executives:

• CEO: "Trust is our product. Zero tolerance for breaches."
• CFO: "Storage costs growing exponentially. Need lifecycle management."
• CISO: "Zero-trust architecture, end-to-end encryption."
  Tech: RPO 15m, RTO 2h for core DB. All data CMEK encrypted. Strict access controls, audit logging. Prevent data exfiltration.
  Constraints: Images retained 7 years but rarely accessed after 90 days. Researchers use external identities. No public IPs on compute.

Which disaster recovery architecture should you design for the core database to meet the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 2 hours?