Question 151
Your customer is receiving reports that their recently updated Google App Engine application is taking approximately 30 seconds to load for some of their users. This behavior was not reported before the update. What strategy should you take?
Question 152
Case Study: 5 - Dress4win
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.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study. You want to ensure that your on-premises architecture meets business requirements before you migrate your solution.
What change in the on-premises architecture should you make?
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.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study. You want to ensure that your on-premises architecture meets business requirements before you migrate your solution.
What change in the on-premises architecture should you make?
Question 153
For this question, refer to the JencoMart case study.
JencoMart wants to move their User Profiles database to Google Cloud Platform. Which Google Database should they use?
JencoMart wants to move their User Profiles database to Google Cloud Platform. Which Google Database should they use?
Question 154
Case Study: 2 - TerramEarth 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.
Company Background
TerramEarth formed in 1946, when several small, family owned companies combined to retool after World War II. The company cares about their employees and customers and considers them to be extended members of their family.
TerramEarth is proud of their ability to innovate on their core products and find new markets as their customers' needs change. For the past 20 years trends in the industry have been largely toward increasing productivity by using larger vehicles with a human operator.
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-based systems that reside in a data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, transform and aggregate them, 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, without
increasing the cost of carrying surplus inventory
- Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use
their equipment IP 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
CEO Statement
We have been successful in capitalizing on the trend toward larger vehicles to increase the productivity of our customers. Technological change is occurring rapidly and TerramEarth has taken advantage of connected devices technology to provide our customers with better services, such as our intelligent farming equipment. With this technology, we have been able to increase farmers' yields by 25%, by using past trends to adjust how our vehicles operate. These advances have led to the rapid growth of our agricultural product line, which we expect will generate 50% of our revenues by 2020.
CTO Statement
Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process with our ability to build better vehicles for tower 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. Unfortunately, our CEO doesn't take technology obsolescence seriously and he considers the many new companies in our industry to be niche players. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
For this question, refer to the TerramEarth case study. To speed up data retrieval, more vehicles will be upgraded to cellular connections and be able to transmit data to the ETL process. The current FTP process is error-prone and restarts the data transfer from the start of the file when connections fail, which happens often. You want to improve the reliability of the solution and minimize data transfer time on the cellular connections. What should you do?
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.
Company Background
TerramEarth formed in 1946, when several small, family owned companies combined to retool after World War II. The company cares about their employees and customers and considers them to be extended members of their family.
TerramEarth is proud of their ability to innovate on their core products and find new markets as their customers' needs change. For the past 20 years trends in the industry have been largely toward increasing productivity by using larger vehicles with a human operator.
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-based systems that reside in a data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, transform and aggregate them, 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, without
increasing the cost of carrying surplus inventory
- Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use
their equipment IP 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
CEO Statement
We have been successful in capitalizing on the trend toward larger vehicles to increase the productivity of our customers. Technological change is occurring rapidly and TerramEarth has taken advantage of connected devices technology to provide our customers with better services, such as our intelligent farming equipment. With this technology, we have been able to increase farmers' yields by 25%, by using past trends to adjust how our vehicles operate. These advances have led to the rapid growth of our agricultural product line, which we expect will generate 50% of our revenues by 2020.
CTO Statement
Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process with our ability to build better vehicles for tower 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. Unfortunately, our CEO doesn't take technology obsolescence seriously and he considers the many new companies in our industry to be niche players. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
For this question, refer to the TerramEarth case study. To speed up data retrieval, more vehicles will be upgraded to cellular connections and be able to transmit data to the ETL process. The current FTP process is error-prone and restarts the data transfer from the start of the file when connections fail, which happens often. You want to improve the reliability of the solution and minimize data transfer time on the cellular connections. What should you do?
Question 155
You are monitoring Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters in a Cloud Monitoring workspace. As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you need to triage incidents quickly. What should you do?