GCP PCA · Question 01 · Domain 1: Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture

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:
Based on the CTO's constraints and the business requirements for daily deployments and scalability, which migration strategy should you recommend for the application tier?