Medium1 markMultiple Choice
Domain 5: Managing Implementation and Ensuring ReliabilityDomain 5Cost OptimizationCommitted Use DiscountsCase 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 05 · Domain 5: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Reliability

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?

Answer options:

A.

Purchase 3-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for the peak holiday traffic volume to maximize the discount percentage.

B.

Use Preemptible VMs for all application workloads to achieve an 80% cost reduction.

C.

Purchase 1-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for the baseline traffic and rely on autoscaling with on-demand instances for the seasonal spikes.

D.

Implement Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs) by manually turning off servers during off-peak hours.

How to approach this question

Understand the difference between baseline load and peak load. CUDs are for predictable, 24/7 baseline load. Autoscaling handles the unpredictable or seasonal peaks.

Full Answer

C.Purchase 1-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for the baseline traffic and rely on autoscaling with on-demand instances for the seasonal spikes.✓ Correct
Purchase 1-year Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for the baseline traffic and rely on autoscaling with on-demand instances for the seasonal spikes.
Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) provide up to 57-70% discounts in exchange for a 1 or 3-year commitment. The architectural best practice is to purchase CUDs for your known baseline utilization and use autoscaling with standard on-demand pricing to handle bursts. This minimizes waste while maximizing savings.

Common mistakes

Choosing Preemptible/Spot VMs (B) is a common mistake for cost reduction, but they violate the strict reliability requirements of a live gaming backend.

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