Flowlogistic Case Study
Company Overview
Flowlogistic is a leading logistics and supply chain provider. They help businesses throughout the world
manage their resources and transport them to their final destination. The company has grown rapidly,
expanding their offerings to include rail, truck, aircraft, and oceanic shipping.
Company Background
The company started as a regional trucking company, and then expanded into other logistics market.
Because they have not updated their infrastructure, managing and tracking orders and shipments has
become a bottleneck. To improve operations, Flowlogistic developed proprietary technology for tracking
shipments in real time at the parcel level. However, they are unable to deploy it because their technology
stack, based on Apache Kafka, cannot support the processing volume. In addition, Flowlogistic wants to
further analyze their orders and shipments to determine how best to deploy their resources.
Solution Concept
Flowlogistic wants to implement two concepts using the cloud:
Use their proprietary technology in a real-time inventory-tracking system that indicates the location of

their loads
Perform analytics on all their orders and shipment logs, which contain both structured and unstructured

data, to determine how best to deploy resources, which markets to expand info. They also want to use
predictive analytics to learn earlier when a shipment will be delayed.
Existing Technical Environment
Flowlogistic architecture resides in a single data center:
Databases

8 physical servers in 2 clusters
- SQL Server - user data, inventory, static data
3 physical servers
- Cassandra - metadata, tracking messages
10 Kafka servers - tracking message aggregation and batch insert
Application servers - customer front end, middleware for order/customs

60 virtual machines across 20 physical servers
- Tomcat - Java services
- Nginx - static content
- Batch servers
Storage appliances

- iSCSI for virtual machine (VM) hosts
- Fibre Channel storage area network (FC SAN) - SQL server storage
- Network-attached storage (NAS) image storage, logs, backups
10 Apache Hadoop /Spark servers

- Core Data Lake
- Data analysis workloads
20 miscellaneous servers

- Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts,
Business Requirements
Build a reliable and reproducible environment with scaled panty of production.

Aggregate data in a centralized Data Lake for analysis

Use historical data to perform predictive analytics on future shipments

Accurately track every shipment worldwide using proprietary technology

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
Handle both streaming and batch data

Migrate existing Hadoop workloads

Ensure architecture is scalable and elastic to meet the changing demands of the company.

Use managed services whenever possible

Encrypt data flight and at rest

Connect a VPN between the production data center and cloud environment

SEO Statement
We have grown so quickly that our inability to upgrade our infrastructure is really hampering further growth
and efficiency. We are efficient at moving shipments around the world, but we are inefficient at moving
data around.
We need to organize our information so we can more easily understand where our customers are and
what they are shipping.
CTO Statement
IT has never been a priority for us, so as our data has grown, we have not invested enough in our
technology. I have a good staff to manage IT, but they are so busy managing our infrastructure that I
cannot get them to do the things that really matter, such as organizing our data, building the analytics, and
figuring out how to implement the CFO' s tracking technology.
CFO Statement
Part of our competitive advantage is that we penalize ourselves for late shipments and deliveries. Knowing
where out shipments are at all times has a direct correlation to our bottom line and profitability.
Additionally, I don't want to commit capital to building out a server environment.
Flowlogistic's CEO wants to gain rapid insight into their customer base so his sales team can be better
informed in the field. This team is not very technical, so they've purchased a visualization tool to simplify
the creation of BigQuery reports. However, they've been overwhelmed by all the data in the table, and are
spending a lot of money on queries trying to find the data they need. You want to solve their problem in the
most cost-effective way. What should you do?

Case Study 2 - MJTelco
Company Overview
MJTelco is a startup that plans to build networks in rapidly growing, underserved markets around the world.
The company has patents for innovative optical communications hardware. Based on these patents, they can create many reliable, high-speed backbone links with inexpensive hardware.
Company Background
Founded by experienced telecom executives, MJTelco uses technologies originally developed to overcome communications challenges in space. Fundamental to their operation, they need to create a distributed data infrastructure that drives real-time analysis and incorporates machine learning to continuously optimize their topologies. Because their hardware is inexpensive, they plan to overdeploy the network allowing them to account for the impact of dynamic regional politics on location availability and cost.
Their management and operations teams are situated all around the globe creating many-to-many relationship between data consumers and provides in their system. After careful consideration, they decided public cloud is the perfect environment to support their needs.
Solution Concept
MJTelco is running a successful proof-of-concept (PoC) project in its labs. They have two primary needs:
* Scale and harden their PoC to support significantly more data flows generated when they ramp to more than 50,000 installations.
* Refine their machine-learning cycles to verify and improve the dynamic models they use to control topology definition.
MJTelco will also use three separate operating environments - development/test, staging, and production - to meet the needs of running experiments, deploying new features, and serving production customers.
Business Requirements
* Scale up their production environment with minimal cost, instantiating resources when and where needed in an unpredictable, distributed telecom user community.
* Ensure security of their proprietary data to protect their leading-edge machine learning and analysis.
* Provide reliable and timely access to data for analysis from distributed research workers
* Maintain isolated environments that support rapid iteration of their machine-learning models without affecting their customers.
Technical Requirements
* Ensure secure and efficient transport and storage of telemetry data
* Rapidly scale instances to support between 10,000 and 100,000 data providers with multiple flows each.
* Allow analysis and presentation against data tables tracking up to 2 years of data storing approximately
100m records/day
* Support rapid iteration of monitoring infrastructure focused on awareness of data pipeline problems both in telemetry flows and in production learning cycles.
CEO Statement
Our business model relies on our patents, analytics and dynamic machine learning. Our inexpensive hardware is organized to be highly reliable, which gives us cost advantages. We need to quickly stabilize our large distributed data pipelines to meet our reliability and capacity commitments.
CTO Statement
Our public cloud services must operate as advertised. We need resources that scale and keep our data secure. We also need environments in which our data scientists can carefully study and quickly adapt our models. Because we rely on automation to process our data, we also need our development and test environments to work as we iterate.
CFO Statement
The project is too large for us to maintain the hardware and software required for the data and analysis.
Also, we cannot afford to staff an operations team to monitor so many data feeds, so we will rely on automation and infrastructure. Google Cloud's machine learning will allow our quantitative researchers to work on our high-value problems instead of problems with our data pipelines.
MJTelco needs you to create a schema in Google Bigtable that will allow for the historical analysis of the last 2 years of records. Each record that comes in is sent every 15 minutes, and contains a unique identifier of the device and a data record. The most common query is for all the data for a given device for a given day. Which schema should you use?

Your company needs to upload their historic data to Cloud Storage. The security rules don't allow access from external IPs to their on-premises resources. After an initial upload, they will add new data from existing on-premises applications every day. What should they do?

You are choosing a NoSQL database to handle telemetry data submitted from millions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The volume of data is growing at 100 TB per year, and each data entry has about 100 attributes.
The data processing pipeline does not require atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID). However, high availability and low latency are required.
You need to analyze the data by querying against individual fields. Which three databases meet your requirements? (Choose three.)

You need to set access to BigQuery for different departments within your company. Your solution should comply with the following requirements:
* Each department should have access only to their data.
* Each department will have one or more leads who need to be able to create and update tables and provide them to their team.
* Each department has data analysts who need to be able to query but not modify data.
How should you set access to the data in BigQuery?