Google Certified Professional - Cloud Architect (GCP) - Professional-Cloud-Architect Exam Practice Test

Case Study: 11 - TerramEarth
Company overview
TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries. 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 2 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation currently, and we see 20% yearly growth.
Vehicles collect telemetry data from many sensors during operation. A small subset of critical data is transmitted from the vehicles in real time to facilitate fleet management. The rest of the sensor data is collected, compressed, and uploaded daily when the vehicles return to home base.
Each vehicle usually generates 200 to 500 megabytes of data per day.
Existing technical environment
TerramEarth's vehicle data aggregation and analysis infrastructure resides in Google Cloud and serves clients from all around the world. A growing amount of sensor data is captured from their two main manufacturing plants and sent to private data centers that contain their legacy inventory and logistics management systems. The private data centers have multiple network interconnects configured to Google Cloud. The web frontend for dealers and customers is running in Google Cloud and allows access to stock management and analytics.
Business requirements
- Predict and detect vehicle malfunction and rapidly ship parts to dealerships for just-in-time repair where possible.
- Decrease cloud operational costs and adapt to seasonality.
- Increase speed and reliability of development workflow.
- Allow remote developers to be productive without compromising code or data security.
- Create a flexible and scalable platform for developers to create custom API services for dealers and partners.
Technical requirements
- Create a new abstraction layer for HTTP API access to their legacy systems to enable a gradual move into the cloud without disrupting operations.
- Modernize all CI/CD pipelines to allow developers to deploy container-based workloads in highly scalable environments.
- Allow developers to run experiments without compromising security and governance requirements.
- Create a self-service portal for internal and partner developers to create new projects, request resources for data analytics jobs, and centrally manage access to the API endpoints.
- Use cloud-native solutions for keys and secrets management and optimize for identity-based access.
- Improve and standardize tools necessary for application and network monitoring and troubleshooting.
Executive statement
Our competitive advantage has always been our focus on the customer, with our ability to provide excellent customer service and minimize vehicle downtimes.
After moving multiple systems into Google Cloud, we are seeking new ways to provide best-in- class online fleet management services to our customers and improve operations of our dealerships. Our 5-year strategic plan is to create a partner ecosystem of new products by enabling access to our data, increasing autonomous operation capabilities of our vehicles, and creating a path to move the remaining legacy systems to the cloud.
You are migrating a Linux-based application from your private data center to Google Cloud. The TerramEarth security team sent you several recent Linux vulnerabilities published by Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). You need assistance in understanding how these vulnerabilities could impact your migration. What should you do? (Choose two.)

You are working at an institution that processes medical data. You are migrating several workloads onto Google Cloud. Company policies require all workloads to run on physically separated hardware, and workloads from different clients must also be separated. You created a sole-tenant node group and added a node for each client. You need to deploy the workloads on these dedicated hosts. What should you do?

You need to deploy an update to an application in Google App Engine. The update is risky, but it can only be tested in a live environment. What is the best way to introduce the update to minimize risk?

Your organization wants to control IAM policies for different departments independently, but centrally. Which approach should you take?

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. Dress4Win is expected to grow to 10 times its size in 1 year with a corresponding growth in data and traffic that mirrors the existing patterns of usage. The CIO has set the target of migrating production infrastructure to the cloud within the next 6 months. How will you configure the solution to scale for this growth without making major application changes and still maximize the ROI?

Case Study: 13 - KnightMotives Automotive
Company Overview
KnightMotives is a car manufacturer specializing in autonomous, self-driving vehicles, including Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), hybrids and traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. While KnightMotives has made strides with the in-vehicle experience in their BEV fleet, the hybrid and ICE vehicles have yet to implement these new systems and are viewed poorly by critics and drivers. The lack of modern in-vehicle technology in hybrid and ICE vehicles has resulted in declining sales and customer satisfaction.
KnightMotives wants to modernize the consumer experience across all vehicles within five years Artificial Intelligence offers a unique opportunity to revolutionize the in-vehicle experience, as well as the shopping buying and service/maintenance experience. Investment in this new technology will require a shift in financial priorities on a global scale.
KnightMotives also wants to improve their online ordering system, which is unreliable. Systems for customers to build their vehicle online for acquisition through a dealer are not delivering the data or reliability that dealers need, causing. A strain in the relationship between KnightMotives and dealers. Service technicians and sales staff need better tooling to enhance dealer successes, including built-to-order vehicles.
Solution Concept
KnightMotives wants to shift from manufacturing cars to creating a complete and compelling
"automotive experience." Then strategy prioritizes delivering a consistent experience across all models, developing AI-powered features, generating new revenue from data monetization, adopting a digital focus to differentiate their brand from competitors, and developing better tools for mechanics and salespeople.
Existing Technical Environment
KnightMotives's IT is largely on-premises with some applications on major cloud platforms. Their supply chain runs on an outdated mainframe, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is also outdated, making new promotions and dealer discounts difficult to implement. Dealers have no budget for new equipment. There is fragmentation across vehicles with multiple code bases, and significant technical debt from supporting backwards compatibility. Network connectivity to manufacturing plants and vehicle connectivity in rural areas are challenges.
Business Requirements
Key business requirements include fostering a personalized relationship with the driver and delivering a cohesive experience across all models. Creating a better build-to-order model will reduce time on the lot and provide transparency for both dealers and customers. Additionally, KnightMotives seeks to monetize corporate data to finance new technology investments, as their current AI infrastructure is obsolete and corporate data remains siloed. Security is a paramount concern due to past data breaches Adherence to European Union (EU) data protection regulations, especially for emerging autonomous platforms, is critical.
KnightMotives plans to make significant investments in fully autonomous driving capabilities, with initial implementation targeting regions with favorable regulatory environments. Prioritizing employee upskilling, attracting top-tier talent, and fostering better communication between business and technical teams are also critical objectives.
Technical Requirements
- Modernizing the in-vehicle experience includes developing 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 reliable network connectivity, especially in rural areas, to support real-time AI features and data transmission.
- Network upgrades are necessary to support increased data traffic and improve connectivity
between plants and headquarters.
- IT infrastructure modernization requires adopting a hybrid cloud strategy to leverage the
benefits of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure, and gradually modernizing or replacing legacy systems to improve efficiency and agility.
- Autonomous vehicle development and testing requires investing in cutting-edge AI and machine
learning technologies, building a robust simulation environment, and ensuring compliance with evolving regulations related to autonomous vehicles.
- Data monetization and insights requires implementing a robust data management platform,
strict data security and privacy measures, and a scalable AI/ML infrastructure.
- Increased focus 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.
- Providing 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 enhancing safety and saving lives by leveraging an extensive body of data - encompassing driving, road conditions, behavioral studies, and crash safety statistics - to create compelling digital experiences for drivers. Our AI consistently outperforms national safety statistics, ensuring the unique and coveted KnightMotives experience is aligned across all our vehicle models.
Michael Knight, KnightMotives CEO
For this question, refer to the KnightMotives Automotive case study. KnightMotives management wants to upskill their engineering teams. They want each team to experiment with one specific technology at a time in a sandbox environment in Google Cloud. KnightMotives management also wants to prevent any experimental projects from going into production and creating shadow IT.
They want you to design a solution that supports these training objectives and follows Google- recommended practices. What should you do?

Case Study: 9 - Helicopter Racing League
Company overview
Helicopter Racing League (HRL) is a global sports league for competitive helicopter racing. Each year HRL holds the world championship and several regional league competitions where teams compete to earn a spot in the world championship. HRL offers a paid service to stream the races all over the world with live telemetry and predictions throughout each race.
Solution concept
HRL wants to migrate their existing service to a new platform to expand their use of managed AI and ML services to facilitate race predictions. Additionally, as new fans engage with the sport, particularly in emerging regions, they want to move the serving of their content, both real-time and recorded, closer to their users.
Existing technical environment
HRL is a public cloud-first company; the core of their mission-critical applications runs on their current public cloud provider. Video recording and editing is performed at the race tracks, and the content is encoded and transcoded, where needed, in the cloud. Enterprise-grade connectivity and local compute is provided by truck-mounted mobile data centers. Their race prediction services are hosted exclusively on their existing public cloud provider. Their existing technical environment is as follows:
- Existing content is stored in an object storage service on their existing public cloud provider.
- Video encoding and transcoding is performed on VMs created for each job.
- Race predictions are performed using TensorFlow running on VMs in the current public cloud
provider.
Business requirements
HRL's owners want to expand their predictive capabilities and reduce latency for their viewers in emerging markets. Their requirements are:
- Support ability to expose the predictive models to partners.
- Increase predictive capabilities during and before races:
*Race results
*Mechanical failures
*Crowd sentiment
- Increase telemetry and create additional insights.
- Measure fan engagement with new predictions.
- Enhance global availability and quality of the broadcasts.
- Increase the number of concurrent viewers.
- Minimize operational complexity.
- Ensure compliance with regulations.
- Create a merchandising revenue stream.
Technical requirements
- Maintain or increase prediction throughput and accuracy.
- Reduce viewer latency.
- Increase transcoding performance.
- Create real-time analytics of viewer consumption patterns and engagement.
- Create a data mart to enable processing of large volumes of race data.
Executive statement
Our CEO, S. Hawke, wants to bring high-adrenaline racing to fans all around the world. We listen to our fans, and they want enhanced video streams that include predictions of events within the race (e.g., overtaking). Our current platform allows us to predict race outcomes but lacks the facility to support real-time predictions during races and the capacity to process season-long results.
For this question, refer to the Helicopter Racing League (HRL) case study. Recently HRL started a new regional racing league in Cape Town, South Africa. In an effort to give customers in Cape Town a better user experience, HRL has partnered with the Content Delivery Network provider, Fastly. HRL needs to allow traffic coming from all of the Fastly IP address ranges into their Virtual Private Cloud network (VPC network). You need to configure the update that will allow only the Fastly IP address ranges through the External HTTP(S) load balancer. Which should you do?

A development manager is building a new application He asks you to review his requirements and identify what cloud technologies he can use to meet them.
The application must:
1. Be based on open-source technology for cloud portability
2. Dynamically scale compute capacity based on demand
3. Support continuous software delivery
4. Run multiple segregated copies of the same application stack
5. Deploy application bundles using dynamic templates
6. Route network traffic to specific services based on URL
Which combination of technologies will meet all of his requirements?