Google Google Cloud Architect Professional Exam (page: 9)
Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud Architect
Updated on: 31-Aug-2025

Company Overview
Dress4win is a web-based company that helps their users organize and manage their personal wardrobe using a website and mobile application. The company also cultivates an active social network that connects their users with designers and retailers. They monetize their services through advertising, e-commerce, referrals, and a freemium app model. The application has grown from a few servers in the founder's garage to several hundred servers and appliances in a collocated data center. However, the capacity of their infrastructure is now insufficient for the application's rapid growth. Because of this growth and the company's desire to innovate faster. Dress4Win is committing to a full migration to a public cloud.

Solution Concept
For the first phase of their migration to the cloud, Dress4win is moving their development and test environments. They are also building a disaster recovery site, because their current infrastructure is at a single location. They are not sure which components of their architecture they can migrate as is and which components they need to change before migrating them.

Existing Technical Environment

The Dress4win application is served out of a single data center location. All servers run Ubuntu LTS v16.04.

Databases:

MySQL. 1 server for user data, inventory, static data:
- MySQL 5.8
- 8 core CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 2x 5 TB HDD (RAID 1)

Redis 3 server cluster for metadata, social graph, caching. Each server is:

- Redis 3.2
- 4 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM

Compute:

40 Web Application servers providing micro-services based APIs and static content.
- Tomcat - Java
- Nginx
- 4 core CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM

20 Apache Hadoop/Spark servers:

- Data analysis
- Real-time trending calculations
- 8 core CPUS
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 5 TB HDD (RAID 1)

3 RabbitMQ servers for messaging, social notifications, and events:
- 8 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM

Miscellaneous servers:
- Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts, security scanners
- 8 core CPUs
- 32GB of RAM

Storage appliances:

iSCSI for VM hosts
Fiber channel SAN ­ MySQL databases
- 1 PB total storage; 400 TB available
NAS ­ image storage, logs, backups
- 100 TB total storage; 35 TB available

Business Requirements
Build a reliable and reproducible environment with scaled parity of production. Improve security by defining and adhering to a set of security and Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices for cloud.
Improve business agility and speed of innovation through rapid provisioning of new resources. Analyze and optimize architecture for performance in the cloud.
Technical Requirements
Easily create non-production environment in the cloud. Implement an automation framework for provisioning resources in cloud. Implement a continuous deployment process for deploying applications to the on-premises datacenter or cloud.
Support failover of the production environment to cloud during an emergency.
Encrypt data on the wire and at rest.
Support multiple private connections between the production data center and cloud environment.
Executive Statement
Our investors are concerned about our ability to scale and contain costs with our current infrastructure. They are also concerned that a competitor could use a public cloud platform to offset their up-front investment and free them to focus on developing better features. Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle.
Our capital expenditure is now exceeding our quarterly projections. Migrating to the cloud will likely cause an initial increase in spending, but we expect to fully transition before our next hardware refresh cycle. Our total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis over the next 5 years for a public cloud strategy achieves a cost reduction between 30% and 50% over our current model.
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Company Overview

TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries. About 80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.

Solution Concept

There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second. Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced. The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.

Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second with 22 hours of operation per day, TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.

Existing Technical Environment

TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux and Windows-based systems that reside in a single U.S. west coast based data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.

With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.

Business Requirements

Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week. Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use their equipment to better position new products and services
Have the ability to partner with different companies ­ especially with seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural business ­ to create compelling joint offerings for their customers.

Technical Requirements
Expand beyond a single datacenter to decrease latency to the American Midwest and east coast.
Create a backup strategy.
Increase security of data transfer from equipment to the datacenter.
Improve data in the data warehouse.
Use customer and equipment data to anticipate customer needs.

Application 1: Data ingest
A custom Python application reads uploaded datafiles from a single server, writes to the data warehouse.
Compute:
Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 10 TB local HDD storage
Application 2: Reporting
An off the shelf application that business analysts use to run a daily report to see what equipment needs repair. Only 2 analysts of a team of 10 (5 west coast, 5 east coast) can connect to the reporting application at a time.
Compute:
Off the shelf application. License tied to number of physical CPUs
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 500 GB HDD
Data warehouse:
A single PostgreSQL server
- RedHat Linux
- 64 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 6TB HDD in RAID 0

Executive Statement

Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process, with our ability to build better vehicles for lower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
Hide Case Study

Company Overview

TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries. About 80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.

Solution Concept

There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second. Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced. The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.

Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second with 22 hours of operation per day, TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.

Existing Technical Environment

TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux and Windows-based systems that reside in a single U.S. west coast based data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.

With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.

Business Requirements

Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week. Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use their equipment to better position new products and services
Have the ability to partner with different companies ­ especially with seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural business ­ to create compelling joint offerings for their customers.

Technical Requirements
Expand beyond a single datacenter to decrease latency to the American Midwest and east coast.
Create a backup strategy.
Increase security of data transfer from equipment to the datacenter.
Improve data in the data warehouse.
Use customer and equipment data to anticipate customer needs.

Application 1: Data ingest
A custom Python application reads uploaded datafiles from a single server, writes to the data warehouse.
Compute:
Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 10 TB local HDD storage
Application 2: Reporting
An off the shelf application that business analysts use to run a daily report to see what equipment needs repair. Only 2 analysts of a team of 10 (5 west coast, 5 east coast) can connect to the reporting application at a time.
Compute:
Off the shelf application. License tied to number of physical CPUs
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 500 GB HDD
Data warehouse:
A single PostgreSQL server
- RedHat Linux
- 64 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 6TB HDD in RAID 0

Executive Statement

Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process, with our ability to build better vehicles for lower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
Hide Case Study

Company Overview

TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries. About 80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.

Solution Concept

There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second. Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced. The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.

Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second with 22 hours of operation per day, TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.

Existing Technical Environment

TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux and Windows-based systems that reside in a single U.S. west coast based data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.

With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.

Business Requirements

Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week. Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use their equipment to better position new products and services
Have the ability to partner with different companies ­ especially with seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural business ­ to create compelling joint offerings for their customers.

Technical Requirements
Expand beyond a single datacenter to decrease latency to the American Midwest and east coast.
Create a backup strategy.
Increase security of data transfer from equipment to the datacenter.
Improve data in the data warehouse.
Use customer and equipment data to anticipate customer needs.

Application 1: Data ingest
A custom Python application reads uploaded datafiles from a single server, writes to the data warehouse.
Compute:
Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 10 TB local HDD storage
Application 2: Reporting
An off the shelf application that business analysts use to run a daily report to see what equipment needs repair. Only 2 analysts of a team of 10 (5 west coast, 5 east coast) can connect to the reporting application at a time.
Compute:
Off the shelf application. License tied to number of physical CPUs
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 500 GB HDD
Data warehouse:
A single PostgreSQL server
- RedHat Linux
- 64 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 6TB HDD in RAID 0

Executive Statement

Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process, with our ability to build better vehicles for lower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
Hide Case Study

Company Overview

TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries. About 80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.

Solution Concept

There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second. Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced. The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.

Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second with 22 hours of operation per day, TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.

Existing Technical Environment

TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux and Windows-based systems that reside in a single U.S. west coast based data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.

With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.

Business Requirements

Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week. Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use their equipment to better position new products and services
Have the ability to partner with different companies ­ especially with seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural business ­ to create compelling joint offerings for their customers.

Technical Requirements
Expand beyond a single datacenter to decrease latency to the American Midwest and east coast.
Create a backup strategy.
Increase security of data transfer from equipment to the datacenter.
Improve data in the data warehouse.
Use customer and equipment data to anticipate customer needs.

Application 1: Data ingest
A custom Python application reads uploaded datafiles from a single server, writes to the data warehouse.
Compute:
Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 10 TB local HDD storage
Application 2: Reporting
An off the shelf application that business analysts use to run a daily report to see what equipment needs repair. Only 2 analysts of a team of 10 (5 west coast, 5 east coast) can connect to the reporting application at a time.
Compute:
Off the shelf application. License tied to number of physical CPUs
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- 16 CPUs
- 32 GB of RAM
- 500 GB HDD
Data warehouse:
A single PostgreSQL server
- RedHat Linux
- 64 CPUs
- 128 GB of RAM
- 4x 6TB HDD in RAID 0

Executive Statement

Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process, with our ability to build better vehicles for lower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
Hide Case Study