PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-ARCHITECT Real Exam Questions

You are migrating third-party applications from optimized on-premises virtual machines to Google Cloud. You are unsure about the optimum CPU and memory options. The applications have a consistent usage pattern across multiple weeks. You want to optimize resource usage for the lowest cost. What should you do?

You have a Compute Engine managed instance group that adds and removes Compute Engine instances from the group in response to the load on your application. The instances have a shutdown script that removes REDIS database entries associated with the instance. You see that many database entries have not been removed, and you suspect that the shutdown script is the problem. You need to ensure that the commands in the shutdown script are run reliably every time an instance is shut down. You create a Cloud Function to remove the database entries. What should you do next?

Case Study: 8 - Mountkirk Games, C Company overview Mountkirk Games makes online, session-based, multiplayer games for mobile platforms. They have recently started expanding to other platforms after successfully migrating their on-premises environments to Google Cloud. Their most recent endeavor is to create a retro-style first-person shooter (FPS) game that allows hundreds of simultaneous players to join a geo-specific digital arena from multiple platforms and locations. A real-time digital banner will display a global leaderboard of all the top players across every active arena. Solution concept Mountkirk Games is building a new multiplayer game that they expect to be very popular. They plan to deploy the game's backend on Google Kubernetes Engine so they can scale rapidly and use Google's global load balancer to route players to the closest regional game arenas. In order to keep the global leader board in sync, they plan to use a multi-region Spanner cluster. Existing technical environment The existing environment was recently migrated to Google Cloud, and five games came across using lift-and-shift virtual machine migrations, with a few minor exceptions. Each new game exists in an isolated Google Cloud project nested below a folder that maintains most of the permissions and network policies. Legacy games with low traffic have been consolidated into a single project. There are also separate environments for development and testing. Business requirements Support multiple gaming platforms. Support multiple regions. Support rapid iteration of game features. Minimize latency. Optimize for dynamic scaling. Use managed services and pooled resources. Minimize costs. Technical requirements Dynamically scale based on game activity. Publish scoring data on a near real-time global leaderboard. Store game activity logs in structured files for future analysis. Use GPU processing to render graphics server-side for multi-platform support. Support eventual migration of legacy games to this new platform. Executive statement Our last game was the first time we used Google Cloud, and it was a tremendous success. We were able to analyze player behavior and game telemetry in ways that we never could before. This success allowed us to bet on a full migration to the cloud and to start building all-new games using cloud-native design principles. Our new game is our most ambitious to date and will open up doors for us to support more gaming platforms beyond mobile. Latency is our top priority, although cost management is the next most important challenge. As with our first cloud-based game, we have grown to expect the cloud to enable advanced analytics capabilities so we can rapidly iterate on our deployments of bug fixes and new functionality. Mountkirk Games wants to limit the physical location of resources to their operating Google Cloud regions. What should you do?

Your company has an application deployed on Anthos clusters (formerly Anthos GKE) that is running multiple microservices. The cluster has both Anthos Service Mesh and Anthos Config Management configured. End users inform you that the application is responding very slowly. You want to identify the microservice that is causing the delay. What should you do?

Case Study: 4 - Dress4Win case study 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. Company Background Dress4win's application has grown from a few servers in the founder's garage to several hundred servers and appliances in a colocated 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 considering moving their development and test environments. They are also considering 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. Databases: MySQL - user data, inventory, static data Redis - metadata, social graph, caching Application servers: Tomcat - Java micro-services Nginx - static content Apache Beam - Batch processing Storage appliances: iSCSI for VM hosts Fiber channel SAN - MySQL databases NAS - image storage, logs, backups Apache Hadoop/Spark servers: Data analysis Real-time trending calculations MQ servers: Messaging Social notifications Events Miscellaneous servers: Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts, security scanners 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. Migrate fully to the cloud if all other requirements are met. Technical Requirements Evaluate and choose an automation framework for provisioning resources in cloud. Support failover of the production environment to cloud during an emergency. Identify production services that can migrate to cloud to save capacity. Use managed services whenever possible. Encrypt data on the wire and at rest. Support multiple VPN connections between the production data center and cloud environment. CEO Statement Our investors are concerned about our ability to scale and contain costs with our current infrastructure. They are also concerned that a new competitor could use a public cloud platform to offset their up-front investment and freeing them to focus on developing better features. CTO Statement We have invested heavily in the current infrastructure, but much of the equipment is approaching the end of its useful life. We are consistently waiting weeks for new gear to be racked before we can start new projects. Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle. CFO Statement 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 puts a cloud strategy between 30 to 50% lower than our current model. For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study. As part of Dress4Win's plans to migrate to the cloud, they want to be able to set up a managed logging and monitoring system so they can handle spikes in their traffic load. They want to ensure that: - The infrastructure can be notified when it needs to scale up and down to handle the ebb and flow of usage throughout the day - Their administrators are notified automatically when their application reports errors. - They can filter their aggregated logs down in order to debug one piece of the application across many hosts Which Google StackDriver features should they use?