Sample Case Studies

for the Professional

Cloud Architect Exam
Course agenda
Module 1: Understanding the Professional
Cloud Architect Certification

Module 2: Sample Case Studies for the

Professional Cloud Architect Exam

Module 3: Designing and Implementing

(Review and Preparation Tips)

Module 4: Optimizing and Operating

(Review and Preparation Tips)

Module 5: Resources and Next Steps

 Worksheet: case study analysis template
This worksheet is available for you use to
practice analyzing cases.

The worksheet is available in both Google Docs

and as a PDF.

The links are in your Qwiklabs resources.

Google doc link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JtrKKkcq70ZS
3A3_e_dVAURYfMttWxopnyZgTdYLMZo/copy

Short link:
https://goo.gl/XMHgKo

It is recommended that you use a worksheet similar to the one provided to analyze
cases, especially the sample cases provided for the certification exam.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JtrKKkcq70ZS3A3_e_dVAURYfMttWxopnyZgT
dYLMZo/copy
https://goo.gl/XMHgKo
 EHR Healthcare

https://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/master_case_study_ehr_healthcare.pdf

EHR Healthcare is a leading provider of electronic health record software to the

medical industry. EHR Healthcare provides their software as a service to
multi-national medical offices, hospitals, and insurance providers.
 EHR Healthcare

Key business points

Online health records site Core values Immediate business goals

Due to rapid changes in the ● Provide highly available ● Scale their environment
healthcare and insurance services to customers ● Adapt their disaster
industry, EHR Healthcare’s ● Maintain regulatory recovery plan, and
online health records compliance ● Roll out new continuous
software business has been ● Stay current on industry deployment capabilities
growing exponentially year trends to update their software
over year. at a fast pace
● Provide consistent
logging, monitoring, and
alerting capabilities

Solution concept
Due to rapid changes in the healthcare and insurance industry, EHR Healthcare’s
business has been growing exponentially year over year. They need to be able to
scale their environment, adapt their disaster recovery plan, and roll out new
continuous deployment capabilities to update their software at a fast pace.

Google Cloud has been chosen to replace their current colocation facilities.

Executive statement
Our on-premises strategy has worked for years but has required a major investment
of time and money in training our team on distinctly different systems, managing
similar but separate environments, and responding to outages. Many of these
outages have been a result of misconfigured systems, inadequate capacity to
manage spikes in traffic, and inconsistent monitoring practices. We want to use
Google Cloud to leverage a scalable, resilient platform that can span multiple
environments seamlessly and provide a consistent and stable user experience that
positions us for future growth.
 EHR Healthcare

Key business assumptions

Customer On-prem
-facing integrated
web site systems

Rapid changes and exponential Strong focus on regulatory On-prem legacy integrations
growth in the industry will compliance, reduced latency, with insurance providers will
continue and analysis of these and excellent customer service not be upgraded in the
changes is necessary to the required to meet business immediate future and will need
business goals to be supported as-is for now

Business requirements
● On-board new insurance providers as quickly as possible.
● Provide a minimum 99.9% availability for all customer-facing systems.
● Provide centralized visibility and proactive action on system performance and
usage. Increase ability to provide insights into healthcare trends.
● Reduce latency to all customers.
● Maintain regulatory compliance.
● Decrease infrastructure administration costs.
● Make predictions and generate reports on industry trends based on provider
data.
 EHR Healthcare

Technical evaluation
Existing Environment Technical Watchpoints Proposed Product/Solution
Customer-facing applications are Compute
web-based, and many have recently ● Containerized applications
been containerized to run on a group ● Needs to run in the cloud and
of Kubernetes clusters. integrate with on-premises systems
● Autoscaling, low latency
● Robust logging, monitoring and
alerting required
Software is currently hosted in multiple Storage
colocation facilities. The lease on one ● Multiple databases including
of the data centers is about to expire. MySQL, MS SQL Server, Redis, and
MongoDB

Data visualization Data needs

● Nonexistent or minimal ● Fast on-boarding of insurance
providers and their data
● Data Analytics needed to predict
industry and health care trends
● 99.9% availability for
customer-facing data systems

Technical Evaluation
EHR’s software is currently hosted in multiple colocation facilities. The lease on one of
the data centers is about to expire.

Customer-facing applications are web-based, and many have recently been

containerized to run on a group of Kubernetes clusters. Data is stored in a mixture of
relational and NoSQL databases (MySQL, MS SQL Server, Redis, and MongoDB).
Company overview Solution concept

EHR is hosting several legacy file- and API-based integrations with insurance
providers on-premises. These systems are scheduled to be replaced over the next
several years. There is no plan to upgrade or move these systems at the current time.
Users are managed via Microsoft Active Directory. Monitoring is currently being done
via various open source tools. Alerts are sent via email and are often ignored.
Helicopter Racing League

https://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/master_case_study_helicopter_racing_leag
ue.pdf

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.
 Helicopter Racing League

Key business points

Competitive racing league Core values Immediate business goals

Helicopter Racing League ● High-adrenaline coverage ● Migrate existing service

(HRL) is a global sports to fans all over the world to a new platform.
league for competitive ● Enhanced video ● Expand use of AI and ML
helicopter racing. HRL holds streaming with integrated services to facilitate race
the world championship and real-time race predictions predictions.
several regional league ● Season long interest and ● Serve content closer to
competitions where teams results for the sport users (lower latency)
compete to earn a spot in
the world championship.

Solution Concept
Due to rapid changes in the healthcare and insurance industry, EHR Healthcare’s
business has been growing exponentially year over year. They need to be able to
scale their environment, adapt their disaster recovery plan, and roll out new
continuous deployment capabilities to update their software at a fast pace. Google
Cloud has been chosen to replace their current colocation facilities.

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.
 Helicopter Racing League

Key business assumptions

Streaming Real-time
videos analytics

Customers want real-time Business focus should be on Potentially different storage

racing predictions and predictive analytics, expanded solutions for racing videos
higher-quality broadcasts serving capacity, and increased and predictive analytics
fan engagement

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.
 Helicopter Racing League

Technical evaluation
Existing Environment Technical Watchpoints Proposed Product/Solution
Core of their mission-critical Compute
applications runs on their current ● Video encoding and transcoding is
public cloud provider. Video recording performed on VMs created for each
and editing is performed at the race job.
tracks, and the content is encoded and ● Race predictions are performed
transcoded, where needed, in the using TensorFlow running on VMs
cloud.
Content is stored in an object storage Storage
service on their existing public cloud ● Large file object storage (BLOB)
provider.

● Content is stored as BLOBs in an Data (videos)

object storage service ● Large number of concurrent
● Video encoding performed on VMs streaming video viewers
● Race predictions use TensorFlow ● Increased transcoding performance
on VMs ● Ability to create “data mart”

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.
 12

Mountkirk Games

https://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/master_case_study_mountkirk_games.pdf

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.
 MountKirk Games

Key business points

Online games platform Core values Immediate business goals

After initial success with Analyze player behavior and Support new gaming
Google Cloud, now want to game telemetry platforms beyond mobile
build all-new games using Online session-based Rapidly iterate on
cloud-native design multiplayer games deployments
Use managed services and Support hundreds of
Online session-based
pooled resources simultaneous players with
multiplayer games
Minimize cost global leaderboard

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

Key business assumptions

analytics game
data data

Support multiple platforms Need dynamic scaling to Potentially different storage

across multiple regions minimize latency and to solutions for game itself
minimize cost and analytics

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.
 MountKirk Games

Technical evaluation
Existing Environment Technical Watchpoints Proposed Product/Solution
Existing games migrated to Google Compute
Cloud using lift-and-shift VM ● New game backend to be Google
migrations Kubernetes Engine
● Need to scale across regions
● Use GPU processing to render
graphics for multi-platform
● Eventual migration of existing
games to new platform
Separate environments for Storage
development and testing ● New game to using a multi-region
Spanner cluster for global
leaderboard
Data ingestion
● Live metrics from game server
● Game logs stored in structured files
for future analysis

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.

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.

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.
 TerramEarth

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.

https://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/master_case_study_terramearth.pdf
https://pixabay.com/en/industry-heavy-equipment-machine-3286042/
 TerramEarth

Key business points

Family-owned business Core values Immediate business goals

500 dealers, service centers in Excellent customer service Provide best-in-class online
100 countries. fleet management services to
Minimize vehicle downtime our customers
20% yearly growth
Improve operations of our
dealerships and enable
access to data
Predict and detect vehicle
malfunction

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.

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.
 TerramEarth

Vehicles

2 million vehicles
● Telemetry data collected from sensors in the
vehicle
○ Small subset is transmitted in real time for
fleet management
○ Remaining sensor data is uploaded daily
when vehicles return to home base
● Each vehicle generates 200 to 500 MB of data
per day
● 20% annual growth in number of vehicles

https://pixabay.com/en/combine-harvester-harvest-harvester-1562988/

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.
 TerramEarth

Key business assumptions

Predict/detect vehicle Create a platform for Decrease cloud operational

malfunction and rapidly ship developers to create services costs;
parts for just-in-time repair for dealers and partners - Increase speed and reliability
without compromising security of development

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.
 TerramEarth

Technical evaluation
Existing Environment Technical Watchpoints Proposed Product/Solution
● Multiple systems run in Google Cloud; Applications
some legacy systems still ● Container-based workloads
● Web frontend for dealers and customers ● Highly scalable
is in Google Cloud and allows access to ● Cloud-native solutions for keys
stock management and analytics and secrets management
● Identity-based access

Vehicles Migration and Partner Access

● 2 million vehicles x 200 to 500 MB/day ● Create abstraction layer for
HTTP API

Manufacturing Development
● Sensor data is captured from two plants ● Modernize CI/CD pipelines
and sent to private data centers ● Create self-service portal for
○ legacy inventory and logistics systems project and resource mgmt
● Manage API endpoints
○ Private data centers have network
interconnects to Google Cloud

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.

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.