Medium1 markMultiple Choice
Domain 1: Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution ArchitectureDomain 1Cloud SpannerDatabase MigrationCase Study
This question is part of a case study — click to read the full scenario(Case 01)

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?

GCP PCA · Question 03 · 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:
Which database solution should you recommend to replace the on-premises MySQL databases, considering the team's skills, the need for global expansion, and the 99.95% uptime requirement?

Answer options:

A.

Migrate to Cloud SQL for MySQL with High Availability enabled.

B.

Migrate to Cloud Spanner using the MySQL interface.

C.

Migrate to Cloud Bigtable.

D.

Deploy self-managed MySQL on Compute Engine instances across all regions.

How to approach this question

Look at the data requirements: Relational data (MySQL background), global scale (5 regions), high availability (99.95%+). Cloud SQL is regional. Spanner is global. The Spanner MySQL interface bridges the gap for the dev team.

Full Answer

B.Migrate to Cloud Spanner using the MySQL interface.✓ Correct
Migrate to Cloud Spanner using the MySQL interface.
Cloud Spanner is Google's fully managed, horizontally scalable, globally consistent relational database. It is the only GCP service that can handle relational data at a global scale with 99.999% SLA. The introduction of the MySQL interface for Spanner makes it the perfect target for teams migrating from MySQL who need global scale without rewriting their SQL queries.

Common mistakes

Choosing Cloud SQL (A) is a common mistake because it seems like the natural successor to on-prem MySQL. However, Cloud SQL cannot scale horizontally for writes across multiple global regions.

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