Mountkirk Games
The Mountkirk Games case study is about a developer of online, multiplayer games for mobile devices. It has migrated on-premises workloads to Google Cloud. It is creating a game that will enable hundreds of players to play in geospecific digital arenas. The game will include a real-time leader board.
Business and Technical Considerations
The game will be deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using a global load balancer along with a multiregion Cloud Spanner cluster. Some existing games that were migrated to Google Cloud are running on virtual machines although they will be eventually migrated to GKE. Popular legacy games are isolated in their own projects in the resource hierarchy while those with less traffic have been consolidated into one project.
Business sponsors of the game want to support multiple gaming devices in multiple geographic regions in a way that scales to meet demand. Server-side GPU processing will be used to render graphics that can be used on multiple platforms. Latency and costs should be minimized, and the company prefers to use managed services and pooled resources.
Structured game activity logs should be stored for analysis in the future. Mountkirk Games will be making frequent changes and want to be able to rapidly deploy new features and bug fixes.
Architecture Considerations
Mountkirk Games has completed a migration to Google Cloud using a lift-and-shift approach. Legacy games will eventually be migrated from VMs to GKE, but the new game is a higher priority.
The new game will support multiple device platforms, so some processing, like rendering graphics, will be done on the server side to ensure consistency in graphics processing and minimizing the load on players' devices. To minimize latency, plan for global load balancing and multiregion deployment of services in GKE.
Cloud Logging can ingest custom log data, so it should be used to collect game activity logs. Since Cloud Logging stores logs for only 30 days, you will likely need to create a log sink to store the data in Cloud Storage or BigQuery. Since the logs are structured and you will be analyzing the logs, storing them in BigQuery is a good option. At the time of writing, in North America the cost of active storage in BigQuery is about the same as the cost of Standard Storage in Cloud Storage. The cost of BigQuery's Long-term Storage is also about the same as Nearline Storage in Cloud Storage. Prices vary by region and may vary over time.
TerramEarth
The TerramEarth case study describes a heavy equipment manufacturer for the agriculture and mining industries. The company has hundreds of dealers in 100 countries with more than 2 million vehicles in operation. The company is growing at 20 percent annually.
Business and Technical Considerations
Vehicles generate telemetry data from sensors. Most of the data collected is compressed and uploaded after the vehicle returns to its home base. A small amount of data is transmitted in real time. Each vehicle generates from 200 to 500 MB of data per day.
Data aggregation and analysis is performed in Google Cloud. Significant amounts of sensor data from manufacturing plants are stored in legacy inventory and logistics management applications running in private data centers. Those data centers have multiple network interconnects to GCP.
Business sponsors want to predict and detect vehicle malfunctions and ship replacement parts just in time for repairs. They also want to reduce operational costs, increase development speed, support remote work, and provide custom API services for partners.
An HTTP API access layer for legacy systems will be developed to minimize disruptions when moving those services to the cloud.
Developers will use a modern CI/CD platform as well as a self-service platform for creating new projects.
Cloud-native solutions for key management will be used along with identity-based access management.
Architecture Considerations
For data that is transmitted in real time, Cloud Pub/Sub can be used for ingestion. If there is additional processing to be done on that data, Cloud Dataflow could be used to read the data from a Pub/Sub topic, process the data, and then write the results to persistent storage. BigQuery would be a good option for additional analytics.
The other data that is uploaded in batch may be stored in Cloud Storage where a Cloud Dataflow job could decompress the files, perform any needed processing, and write the data to BigQuery.
BigQuery has the advantages of being a fully managed, petabyte-scale analytical database that supports the creation of machine learning models without the need to export data. Also, the machine learning functionality is available through SQL functions, making it accessible to relational database users who may not be familiar with specialized machine learning tools.
TerramEarth is a good use case for Vertex AI. Assuming much of the sensor data is highly structured, that is, it is not images or videos, then AutoML Tables may be used for developing models. If deep learning models are used, then GPUs and TPUs may be used as well.
For workflows with more complex dependencies, Cloud Composer is a good option since it allows you to define workflows as directed acyclic graphs. Consider an MLOps workflow that includes training a machine learning model using the latest data, using the model to make predictions about data collected in real time, and initiating the shipment of replacement parts when a component failure is predicted. If the model is not successfully trained, then the existing prediction job should not be replaced. Instead, the training job should be executed again with an update to the prediction job to follow only if training is successful. This kind of workflow management is handled automatically in Cloud Composer.
Summary
The Google Cloud Professional Architect exam covers several broad areas, including the following:
Planning a cloud solution
Managing a cloud solution
Securing systems and processes
Complying with government and industry regulations
Understanding technical requirements and business considerations
Maintaining solutions deployed to production, including monitoring
These areas require business as well as technical skills. For example, since architects regularly work with nontechnical colleagues, it is important for architects to understand issues such as reducing operational expenses, accelerating the pace of development, maintaining and reporting on service-level agreements, and assisting with regulatory compliance. In the realm of technical knowledge, architects are expected to understand functional requirements around computing, storage, and networking as well as nonfunctional characteristics of services, such as availability and scalability.
The exam includes case studies, and some exam questions reference the case studies. Questions about the case studies may be business or technical questions.
Exam Essentials
Assume every word matters in case studies and exam questions. Some technical requirements are stated explicitly, but some are implied in business statements. Review the business requirements as carefully as the technical requirements in each case study. Similarly, when reading an exam question, pay attention to all the statements. What may look like extraneous background information at first may turn out to be information that you need to choose between two options.
Study and analyze case studies before taking the exam.