Question 1

**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?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 2

What mistakes do candidates make on this GCP PCA question?

Accepted Answer

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.

How to approach this question

Full Answer

Common mistakes

Practice the full GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Exam 3

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