Case Studies and Cheat Sheet

Index

Case Studies

Extra cases used in Sample Questions


Cheat Sheet

General Strategy

  • Read business requirements first

  • Eliminate answers that :

    • Over-engineer

    • Increase ops unnecessarily

    • Ignore cost or reliability

1. Mountkirk Games

Industry: Gaming

Business Goals

  • Global, low‑latency multiplayer gaming

  • Support sudden traffic spikes (game launches)

  • Reduce operational overhead

  • Enable rapid feature development

Key Requirements

  • Stateless, scalable backend

  • Global availability

  • CI/CD and microservices

  • Real‑time analytics

  • Compute: GKE (primary), Cloud Run for event-driven services

  • Networking: Global HTTP(S) Load Balancer, Cloud CDN

  • Data: Cloud Spanner (global consistency) or Firestore

  • CI/CD: Cloud Build + Artifact Registry

  • Monitoring: Cloud Operations Suite

Exam Tips

  • Prefer managed + containerized services

  • Design for global scale first

  • Choose Spanner when strong consistency + global writes are required

2. TerramEarth

Industry: Heavy equipment & IoT

Business Goals

  • Predict equipment failure

  • Ingest massive sensor data streams

  • Support global field operations

  • Minimize downtime

Key Requirements

  • High‑throughput data ingestion

  • Time‑series and analytical workloads

  • ML‑based predictions

  • Hybrid connectivity

  • Ingestion: Pub/Sub

  • Processing: Dataflow (stream + batch)

  • Storage: BigQuery, Cloud Storage

  • ML: Vertex AI

  • Hybrid: Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect

Exam Tips

  • Pub/Sub + Dataflow + BigQuery is a classic pipeline

  • Use Vertex AI, not custom ML infrastructure

  • Emphasize decoupled, event‑driven architecture

3. Helicopter Racing League (HRL)

Industry: Sports & Media

Business Goals

  • Live telemetry processing

  • Real‑time analytics for broadcasts

  • Fan engagement via apps

  • Global audience

Key Requirements

  • Low‑latency streaming

  • High availability during live events

  • Edge delivery

  • Analytics dashboards

  • Ingestion: Pub/Sub

  • Stream Processing: Dataflow

  • Analytics: BigQuery

  • Visualization: Looker / Looker Studio

  • Delivery: Cloud CDN

Exam Tips

  • Optimize for latency over cost

  • Use streaming pipelines, not batch

  • Separate ingestion, processing, and analytics layers

4. EHR Healthcare

Industry: Healthcare

Business Goals

  • Secure electronic health records

  • Meet compliance (HIPAA)

  • High availability

  • Controlled access

Key Requirements

  • Data encryption (at rest & in transit)

  • Audit logging

  • Fine‑grained IAM

  • Disaster recovery

  • Compute: GKE or Compute Engine

  • Storage: Cloud SQL / Spanner (depending on scale)

  • Security: IAM, VPC Service Controls, CMEK

  • Monitoring: Cloud Audit Logs

  • Backup: Automated backups + multi‑region

Exam Tips

  • Always prioritize security and compliance

  • Use least‑privilege IAM

  • Choose managed databases with encryption enabled by default


Cross‑Case Exam Patterns to Remember

Architecture Principles

  • Prefer managed services over self‑managed

  • Design for high availability & scalability

  • Use global services when latency matters

  • Decouple systems using Pub/Sub

Data Choices (Very Common on Exam)

Use Case
Best Choice

Global relational DB

Cloud Spanner

OLAP analytics

BigQuery

Streaming ingestion

Pub/Sub

Batch + stream processing

Dataflow

Object storage

Cloud Storage

Security Defaults

  • IAM with least privilege

  • Encryption by default

  • Use VPC Service Controls for sensitive data

  • Enable Cloud Audit Logs


Quick Decision Heuristics (Exam Gold)

  • Global + strong consistency? → Cloud Spanner

  • Event‑driven scaling? → Pub/Sub + Cloud Run

  • Streaming analytics? → Pub/Sub + Dataflow + BigQuery

  • Minimal ops? → Serverless / managed services

  • Compliance‑heavy? → Security first, cost second

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