Domain 1: Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture

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. Which migration strategy should you recommend for the legacy monolithic application to meet the 12-month timeline and team skill constraints?

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. Which database migration strategy meets the 4-hour downtime constraint and EU data residency requirement?

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. How should you design the hybrid connectivity between GCP microservices and the on-premises Oracle database to ensure high throughput and low latency?

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 architect the highly scalable ingestion layer for MQTT telemetry data from 1 million cars?

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. To meet the 1-hour RPO and 4-hour RTO for the modernized portal database, which architecture should you implement?

A media company needs to store 500TB of video archives. The data is accessed roughly once every 2 years for historical documentaries. Retrieval time must be under 12 hours. Which Cloud Storage class is most cost-effective?

A global financial application requires a relational database with strong consistency, horizontal scalability across multiple continents, and 99.999% availability. Which database service should you choose?

An enterprise has 50 departments. They want central control over network resources (firewalls, subnets) but want each department to manage their own compute resources independently. What network architecture should you design?

You are migrating a monolithic application to microservices on GKE. You want to route traffic gradually from the legacy on-prem system to the new microservices, service by service, without downtime. Which migration pattern should you use?

You are designing a highly available Cloud SQL architecture for a mission-critical application. Which TWO configurations are required to ensure automatic failover in case of a zone outage? (Select TWO)

You are designing an active-active multi-region GKE architecture. Which THREE components are essential for routing global traffic and syncing state? (Select THREE)

Your data analysts are running expensive queries on a 100TB BigQuery table containing 5 years of daily sales data. They usually only query the last 30 days. Which TWO optimizations should you apply? (Select TWO)

A company wants to adopt a multi-cloud strategy using Google Cloud Anthos to manage Kubernetes clusters across GCP, AWS, and on-premises. Which TWO statements about Anthos are correct? (Select TWO)

**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?

**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?

**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:** Based on the CTO's requirement for a consistent management plane across on-premises and the cloud, and the need to modernize to microservices while keeping the mainframe, which compute architecture should you recommend?

**CASE STUDY: CareData Health** **Company Overview:** CareData Health is a large healthcare provider network operating 50 hospitals. They manage petabytes of patient records, medical imaging, and telemetry data. **Current Technical Environment:** - Decentralized on-premises data centers at each hospital - Legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems - Fragmented data silos preventing holistic patient views **Business Requirements:** - Centralize patient data into a single secure data lake - Enable machine learning for predictive diagnostics - Securely share anonymized data with external research partners **Executive Statements:** - CEO: "We must leverage AI to improve patient outcomes and reduce readmission rates." - CISO: "Zero tolerance for data breaches. Patient data must be encrypted everywhere, and we must prevent any unauthorized data exfiltration." - DPO (Data Protection Officer): "We must strictly adhere to HIPAA in the US and GDPR for our European patients. Data residency is mandatory." **Technical Requirements:** - End-to-end encryption using keys managed by CareData - Strict access controls and comprehensive audit logging - Ingestion of HL7 and FHIR healthcare data formats - Physical separation of EU and US data **Constraints:** - Highly regulated environment - Legacy systems cannot be modified, only integrated with **QUESTION:** How should you architect the ingestion pipeline to handle the legacy EHR data formats (HL7 and FHIR) without modifying the legacy systems?

**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 meet the CTO's requirement for infinite scaling and the technical requirement to ingest 100,000 messages per second, which ingestion and processing pipeline should you design?

**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 fulfill the business requirement of 'predictive maintenance', the data science team needs to train machine learning models on the historical telemetry data. Which GCP service should you recommend for building, training, and deploying these models?

A startup is building a new stateless web application using Docker containers. The traffic is highly unpredictable, often dropping to zero overnight but spiking massively during marketing campaigns. The team has no infrastructure experience and wants to minimize operational overhead. Which compute service should you recommend?

You are designing the GCP Resource Hierarchy for a large enterprise. The company has three distinct business units (Retail, Wholesale, Logistics). Each business unit has its own IT team and requires strict isolation. Within each business unit, they have Development, Staging, and Production environments. How should you structure the Folders and Projects?

Your enterprise is migrating a massive, monolithic legacy application to Google Cloud. The business cannot tolerate a multi-year 'big bang' migration where the new system is built in secret and swapped overnight. They want to migrate functionality piece by piece to microservices on GKE while the legacy system continues to run. Which architectural pattern should you adopt?

You are designing a global financial application using Cloud Spanner. The application requires strong consistency and high availability across the US and Europe. You have chosen a multi-region Spanner configuration. Which TWO statements accurately describe how Cloud Spanner handles data replication and leader election in a multi-region setup? (Select TWO)

Your company runs a monolithic application on Compute Engine. You need to design a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy that provides a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 5 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 hour. Which TWO architectural patterns should you implement? (Select TWO)

You are designing the data architecture for a new application. You need to choose between Cloud Bigtable and BigQuery. Which TWO statements correctly describe the use cases for these services? (Select TWO)

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: 500 employees, $100M revenue. On-prem US/EU, 200 servers, 5TB MySQL. 2M peak users, $100K/mo cost. Business: Reduce cost 40%, 5x growth, launch APAC/SA/Africa, daily deployments. Executives: - CEO: "Scale rapidly to compete. Cloud is critical." - CFO: "Cost reduction paramount. Max $100K/mo. ROI in 18 months." - CTO: "Team has limited cloud experience. 99.95% uptime non-negotiable." Tech: <100ms latency globally, real-time analytics, 5x seasonal spikes, EU data residency, DDoS protection, CI/CD. Constraints: 12-month migration, 4hr max downtime, 20 devs (Java/MySQL), 5 ops (limited cloud), $2M budget. Which migration strategy should you recommend for the core gaming application to meet the business and technical requirements?

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: 500 employees, $100M revenue. On-prem US/EU, 200 servers, 5TB MySQL. 2M peak users, $100K/mo cost. Business: Reduce cost 40%, 5x growth, launch APAC/SA/Africa, daily deployments. Executives: - CEO: "Scale rapidly to compete. Cloud is critical." - CFO: "Cost reduction paramount. Max $100K/mo. ROI in 18 months." - CTO: "Team has limited cloud experience. 99.95% uptime non-negotiable." Tech: <100ms latency globally, real-time analytics, 5x seasonal spikes, EU data residency, DDoS protection, CI/CD. Constraints: 12-month migration, 4hr max downtime, 20 devs (Java/MySQL), 5 ops (limited cloud), $2M budget. How should you design the network architecture to ensure DDoS protection and compliance with the EU data residency requirement?

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: 500 employees, $100M revenue. On-prem US/EU, 200 servers, 5TB MySQL. 2M peak users, $100K/mo cost. Business: Reduce cost 40%, 5x growth, launch APAC/SA/Africa, daily deployments. Executives: - CEO: "Scale rapidly to compete. Cloud is critical." - CFO: "Cost reduction paramount. Max $100K/mo. ROI in 18 months." - CTO: "Team has limited cloud experience. 99.95% uptime non-negotiable." Tech: <100ms latency globally, real-time analytics, 5x seasonal spikes, EU data residency, DDoS protection, CI/CD. Constraints: 12-month migration, 4hr max downtime, 20 devs (Java/MySQL), 5 ops (limited cloud), $2M budget. Which database solution should you recommend to replace the 5TB MySQL database, given the need for global scale, relational consistency, and the 4-hour downtime constraint?

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. Which migration approach should you recommend to safely break down the monolith with zero downtime?

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. Which strategy should you use to migrate the 20TB Oracle database to an open-source solution with zero downtime?

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. Which architecture should you design for the data ingestion and processing layer to replace the crashing MQTT brokers?

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. Which database should you use to serve the real-time fleet tracking dashboard requiring sub-second queries on massive time-series data?

A financial institution is migrating its core banking application to Google Cloud. The application requires a relational database that provides strong global consistency, zero downtime for schema changes, and horizontal scalability. Which database service should you recommend?

Your company is planning a migration of 500 VMs from an on-premises VMware environment to Google Cloud. The CFO requires a detailed cost estimate and the CTO wants to identify application dependencies before moving any workloads. Which tool should you use?

You are designing a hybrid cloud architecture. Your on-premises data center must connect to Google Cloud to access a large BigQuery dataset and several internal Compute Engine APIs. The connection must be highly available (99.99%), provide at least 10 Gbps of bandwidth, and traffic must not traverse the public internet. Which TWO actions should you take? (Select TWO)

A retail company is migrating its e-commerce platform to GCP. They want to use a microservices architecture. The frontend will be hosted on Cloud Run. The backend inventory service requires a database that supports ACID transactions, relational schemas, and can scale horizontally to handle unpredictable viral sales events. Which TWO services should you include in the architecture? (Select TWO)

You are planning a migration of a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application currently runs on bare-metal Linux servers and uses a local file system to store user-uploaded images. The business requires the migration to be completed in 3 months with minimal code changes, but wants to improve the durability of the image storage. Which THREE steps should you take? (Select THREE)