Operations & Reliability

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:
To address the CFO's cost concerns and the CTO's team constraints, which combination of strategies should you implement?

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:
To handle the Black Friday seasonal spikes for the initially migrated Compute Engine workloads, which TWO actions should you take? (Select TWO)

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:
To ensure the reliability of the new ingestion pipeline, the operations team wants to implement SRE practices. How should they measure the performance of the ingestion API?

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:
How should you design the resource hierarchy and billing to meet the CFO's requirement for cost attribution per hospital tenant?

A new developer joins your team and needs to view the logs for a specific Cloud Run service to troubleshoot an issue. They should not be able to modify the service or view logs for other services. Which IAM role should you grant?

Your company hosts a public-facing web application on GKE behind a Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer. You notice a sudden spike in traffic originating from a specific country, which is causing performance degradation. The traffic appears to be a Layer 7 DDoS attack. How can you quickly mitigate this?

You have implemented VPC Service Controls to protect your BigQuery datasets. A data scientist working from home needs to query the data using the BigQuery web UI. Their home IP address is dynamic. How can you grant them access without compromising the security perimeter?

Your company requires that all data stored in Cloud Storage be encrypted using keys managed by your security team. The security team wants to automatically rotate the keys every 90 days. Which encryption method should you use?

A media company serves terabytes of video content daily to users globally. They are currently serving the videos directly from Cloud Storage buckets in the US, resulting in high network egress costs and high latency for users in Asia and Europe. Which TWO architectural changes should you implement to reduce costs and improve performance? (Select TWO)

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.

How should you address the CFO's requirement to reduce costs by 40% for the steady-state baseline compute resources?

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.

To route traffic globally to the closest healthy GKE cluster and offload SSL, which load balancer should you configure?

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.

How should you handle the intermittent connectivity of vehicles to ensure no telemetry data is lost when they reconnect?

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.

How should you configure the database network to meet the constraint of 'No public DB IPs' while allowing the modernized portal to access it?

You want to measure the latency of a user's journey from clicking 'Checkout' to receiving an order confirmation. Which Service Level Indicator (SLI) type is most appropriate?

Your finance team needs to allocate GCP costs to specific cost centers (e.g., Marketing, R&D) across multiple shared projects. How should you configure resources to enable this chargeback model?

Which TWO workloads are ideal candidates for running on Spot VMs (Preemptible VMs) to optimize costs? (Select TWO)

Your company is experiencing high network egress costs. Which TWO strategies should you implement to reduce these costs? (Select TWO)

An enterprise wants to establish a robust FinOps culture. They need to visualize spend, allocate costs to teams, and enforce budget limits. Which THREE actions should they take? (Select THREE)

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:
To meet the CFO's requirement of reducing costs to under $60K/month while handling seasonal traffic spikes, which cost optimization strategy should you implement?

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 handle the Black Friday traffic (10x normal load), the operations team is concerned about the GKE cluster scaling fast enough. What combination of GCP features should you implement to ensure the platform remains responsive?

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:
To address the CFO's concern about the cost of ingesting millions of messages, how should you optimize the data transmission from the cars to Cloud Pub/Sub?

A complex microservices application running on GKE is experiencing intermittent high latency. The application consists of 15 different services written in Go and Java. Users report that the checkout process sometimes takes 5 seconds instead of the usual 200ms. You need to identify exactly which microservice is causing the bottleneck. Which GCP observability tool should you use?

The CFO of your company wants to create custom dashboards to analyze Google Cloud spending across different departments. They want to write SQL queries to find out exactly how much the 'Marketing' department spent on BigQuery last month. How should you configure the billing data to enable this?

You manage a GKE cluster that runs a mix of critical web services and fault-tolerant batch processing jobs. The CFO has asked you to drastically reduce the compute costs of the cluster. How should you optimize the cluster architecture?

Your data analytics team runs massive SQL queries on BigQuery. The CFO has noticed that BigQuery costs are spiraling out of control because analysts are running SELECT * queries on petabyte-scale tables. Which THREE strategies should you implement to optimize BigQuery costs? (Select THREE)

You are defining the reliability metrics for a new API service according to Google's SRE practices. Which TWO statements correctly define the relationship between Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs)? (Select TWO)

A startup is running their application on Compute Engine. They have a predictable baseline load that runs 24/7, but they also have a unique workload that requires exactly 5 vCPUs and 12 GB of RAM. They want to minimize their monthly compute bill. Which TWO features should they utilize? (Select TWO)

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.

How should you optimize compute costs while ensuring the platform can handle Black Friday traffic spikes?

CASE STUDY: AutoIoT

Overview: Connected car manufacturer. 1M vehicles sending telemetry every 5 seconds.
Business: Predictive maintenance alerts, real-time fleet tracking, monetize anonymized data.
Executives:

• CEO: "Leverage AI to predict failures."
• CTO: "Current MQTT brokers crashing. Need fully managed, scalable ingestion."
• DPO: "Vehicle location is sensitive. Strip PII before analytics."
  Tech: Ingest millions of msgs/sec, real-time stream processing for anomalies, store raw data for ML, sub-second queries for dashboards.
  Constraints: Vehicles lose connection and send late batch data. ML models updated weekly. Strict analytics budget.

To meet the CEO's requirement for predictive maintenance, how should you orchestrate the weekly ML model training pipeline?

You are managing a data warehouse in BigQuery. The marketing team runs complex analytical queries at the end of every month, while the sales team runs simple, frequent queries daily. The CFO is concerned about the unpredictable costs of BigQuery. How should you optimize the costs?