Professional Cloud ArchitectDemo

You analyzed TerramEarth's business requirement to reduce downtime and found that most time savings can be achieved by reducing customers' wait time for parts. You decided to focus on reducing the 3-week aggregate reporting time.

Which changes to the company's processes should you recommend?

You have an application that will run on Compute Engine. You must design an architecture that accounts for a disaster recovery plan requiring the application to fail over to another region if a regional outage occurs. What should you do?

You need to create procedures for testing a disaster plan for a mission-critical application. You want to follow Google-recommended practices and use native GCP capabilities.

What should you do?

You have a Compute Engine application that should autoscale when total memory utilization exceeds 80%. You installed the Cloud Monitoring agent and configured the autoscaling policy as follows:

• Metric identifier: agent.googleapis.com/memory/percent_used
• Filter: metric.label.state = 'used'
• Target utilization level: 80
• Target type: GAUGE

The application does not scale during high load. You want to fix this. What should you do?

Mountkirk Games wants to restrict the physical locations of resources to its operating Google Cloud regions. What should you do?

Your company intends to migrate a multi-petabyte data set to the cloud. The data set must be available 24hrs a day. Your business analysts have experience only using a SQL interface.

How should you store the data to optimize it for ease of analysis?

You have a Compute Engine managed instance group that adds and removes Compute Engine instances in response to your application's load. The instances use a shutdown script to remove REDIS database entries associated with each instance. You notice that many database entries were not removed and suspect the shutdown script is the cause.

You must ensure the commands in the shutdown script execute reliably whenever an instance is shut down. You create a Cloud Function to remove the database entries. What should you do next?

You run a cluster on Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that serves a web application. Users report that a particular part of the application no longer responds. You observe that every pod in your deployment restarts after 2 seconds. The application writes logs to standard output. You need to inspect the logs to determine the cause of the issue. Which approach can you use?

You need to ensure application and operational reliability by enabling dependable task scheduling for compute on GCP. Following Google best practices, what should you do?

Refer to the KnightMotives Automotive case study. KnightMotives wants to personalize its dealer experience for customers and has chosen to train its own AI models for personalized recommendations. The company will begin collecting personally identifiable information (PII) from customers for use as training data for the models. KnightMotives wants to ensure maximum security and worldwide compliance. You must ensure that the data is encrypted both at rest and while AI model training occurs, without affecting model accuracy. What should you do?

Refer to the Helicopter Racing League (HRL) case study. Your team is responsible for creating a payment-card data vault for card numbers used to bill tens of thousands of viewers, merchandise consumers, and season ticket holders. You must implement a custom card-tokenization service that meets these requirements:

• It must deliver low latency at minimal cost.
• It must identify duplicate credit cards and must not retain plaintext card numbers.
• It should support annual key rotation.

Which storage approach should you use for the tokenization service?

You need to migrate Hadoop jobs for your company’s Data Science team without changing the underlying infrastructure. You want to minimize costs and the effort required to manage infrastructure. What should you do?

Mountkirk Games wants to establish a continuous-delivery pipeline. Its architecture contains many small services that it needs to update and roll back quickly. Mountkirk Games has these requirements:

• Services are deployed redundantly across multiple regions in the US and Europe.
• Only frontend services are exposed on the public internet.
• They can provide a single frontend IP for their fleet of services.
• Deployment artifacts are immutable.

Which product set should they use?

Company Overview —

KnightMotives is a car manufacturer that specializes in autonomous, self-driving vehicles, including Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), hybrids, and traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Although KnightMotives has advanced the in-vehicle experience in its BEV fleet, the hybrid and ICE vehicles have not yet adopted these new systems and are regarded poorly by critics and drivers. The absence of modern in-vehicle technology in hybrid and ICE vehicles has led to declining sales and customer satisfaction.

KnightMotives wants to modernize the consumer experience across all vehicles within five years. Artificial Intelligence provides a unique opportunity to transform the in-vehicle experience, as well as the shopping, buying, and service/maintenance experience. Investing in this new technology will require a global shift in financial priorities.

KnightMotives also wants to enhance its unreliable online ordering system. Systems that let customers build their vehicle online for acquisition through a dealer are not providing the data or reliability dealers require, causing a strain in the relationship between KnightMotives and dealers. Service technicians and sales staff require improved tooling to advance dealer success, including for built-to-order vehicles.

Solution Concept —

KnightMotives wants to move from manufacturing cars to creating a complete and compelling “automotive experience.” The strategy emphasizes delivering a consistent experience across all models, developing AI-powered features, producing new revenue through data monetization, adopting a digital focus to distinguish its brand from competitors, and creating better tools for mechanics and salespeople.

Existing Technical Environment —

KnightMotives's IT is primarily on-premises, with some applications on major cloud platforms. Its supply chain operates on an outdated mainframe, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is also outdated, making new promotions and dealer discounts hard to implement. Dealers have no budget for new equipment. Vehicles are fragmented across multiple code bases, with significant technical debt caused by supporting backward compatibility. Network connectivity to manufacturing plants and vehicle connectivity in rural areas are challenges.

Business Requirements —

Key business requirements include cultivating a personalized relationship with the driver and providing a cohesive experience across all models. Establishing a better build-to-order model will reduce time on the lot and offer transparency to both dealers and customers. KnightMotives also seeks to monetize corporate data to fund new technology investments, because its current AI infrastructure is obsolete and corporate data is still siloed. Security is a primary concern because of previous data breaches. Compliance with European Union (EU) data-protection regulations, especially for emerging autonomous platforms, is critical.

KnightMotives plans significant investments in fully autonomous-driving capabilities, with initial implementation aimed at regions with favorable regulatory environments. Employee upskilling, attracting top-tier talent, and improving communication between business and technical teams are also critical goals.

Technical Requirements —

• Modernizing the in-vehicle experience includes creating a consistent user experience (UX) that seamlessly integrates AI-powered features across all models, updating in-vehicle hardware and software in legacy models to support new UX features and AI capabilities, and ensuring dependable network connectivity—especially in rural areas—to support real-time AI features and data transmission.
• Network upgrades are required to support greater data traffic and improve connectivity between plants and headquarters.
• IT infrastructure modernization requires adopting a hybrid-cloud strategy to gain the benefits of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure, and progressively modernizing or replacing legacy systems to increase efficiency and agility.
• Autonomous-vehicle development and testing requires investing in leading AI and machine-learning technologies, building a robust simulation environment, and ensuring compliance with evolving autonomous-vehicle regulations.
• Data monetization and insights requires implementing a robust data-management platform, strict data-security and privacy measures, and scalable AI/ML infrastructure.
• Increased emphasis on security and risk management involves implementing a comprehensive security framework to protect against cyber threats and data breaches, developing an incident-response plan, and providing security-awareness training to employees.
• Delivering a delightful experience for dealers and customers requires improving the online build-to-order system; developing modern dealer tools to streamline dealer operations, including sales, service, and inventory management; and implementing a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track customer interactions, personalize experiences, and improve customer satisfaction.

Executive Statement —

KnightMotives is committed to improving safety and saving lives by using an extensive body of data—including driving, road conditions, behavioral studies, and crash-safety statistics—to create compelling digital experiences for drivers. Our AI consistently exceeds national safety statistics, ensuring that the distinctive and coveted KnightMotives experience is aligned across all vehicle models.

Michael Knight, KnightMotives CEO

For this question, use the KnightMotives Automotive case study. You are responsible for designing the network infrastructure architecture for KnightMotives's new Google Cloud environment. You need to design the new VPC topology. You want to provide guaranteed bandwidth and low latency between the plants and Google Cloud resources. What should you do?

You developed an application with Cloud ML Engine that identifies famous paintings from uploaded images. You need to test the application and let specific people upload images during the next 24 hours. Not every user has a Google Account. How should users upload images?

The operations team at your company wants to retain Cloud VPN log events for one year. You need to configure the cloud infrastructure to store these logs. What should you do?

For this question, refer to the EHR Healthcare case study. EHR Healthcare recently suffered unauthorized access to its Kubernetes-based applications because credentials were compromised, resulting in a security breach. You must secure access between its on-premises systems and the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environment, while preserving regulatory compliance and integrating with EHR's existing identity provider. What should you do?

You need to deploy Microsoft SQL Server on GCP. Management requires no downtime if a data center outage occurs in any zone within a GCP region. What should you do?

Your company uses the Firewall Insights feature in Google Network Intelligence Center and has several firewall rules applied to Compute Engine instances.

You need to assess the efficiency of the applied firewall ruleset. When you open the Firewall Insights page in the Google Cloud Console, you find that no log rows are displayed. What should you do to troubleshoot this issue?

You want to automate creation of a managed instance group. The VMs have many OS package dependencies, and you want to minimize startup time for new VMs in the instance group.

What should you do?

For this question, use the Mountkirk Games case study. You are responsible for the architecture of the new Game Backend Platform. The game communicates with the backend through a REST API.

You want to follow Google-recommended practices. How should you design the backend?

The database administration team has asked for your help improving the performance of its new database server running on Google Compute Engine. The database imports and normalizes its performance statistics and is built with MySQL running on Debian Linux. They have an n1-standard-8 virtual machine with 80 GB of SSD persistent disk.

What should they change to obtain better performance from this system?

The marketing department plans to send a promotional email campaign. The development team wants to minimize direct operations management. They anticipate customer response ranging from 100 to 500,000 click-throughs per day. The link directs users to a simple website that explains the promotion and gathers user information and preferences.

Which infrastructure should you recommend?

Dress4Win has asked you to recommend the machine types on which they should deploy their application servers.

How should you proceed?