Hard1 markMultiple Choice
Domain 2: Managing and Provisioning a Solution InfrastructureDomain 2Cloud Load BalancingCloud ArmorCloud CDN
This question is part of a case study — click to read the full scenario(Case 01)

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming

Company Overview:
TechStream Gaming is a global gaming company with 500 employees and $100M in annual revenue. They develop multiplayer online games.

Current Technical Environment:

  • On-premises data centers in US and EU
  • 200 servers (mix of Windows and Linux)
  • MySQL databases (5 TB total)
  • Peak concurrent users: 2 million
  • Current monthly infrastructure cost: $100K

Business Requirements:

  • Reduce infrastructure costs by 40%
  • Support 5x user growth over 2 years
  • Launch in 3 new regions (APAC, SA, Africa)
  • Improve deployment speed (current: 1 week -> target: daily)

Executive Statements:

  • CEO: "We need to scale rapidly to compete with larger gaming companies. Cloud migration is critical to our growth strategy."
  • CFO: "Cost reduction is paramount. We cannot exceed $60K/month in cloud costs. ROI must be achieved within 18 months."
  • CTO: "Our team has limited cloud experience. We need a solution that doesn't require extensive retraining. Reliability is non-negotiable - 99.95% uptime minimum."

Technical Requirements:

  • Sub-100ms latency for players globally
  • Real-time analytics on player behavior
  • Seasonal traffic spikes (5x during holidays)
  • DDoS protection
  • CI/CD pipeline for daily deployments

Constraints:

  • Migration must complete in 12 months
  • Cannot exceed 4-hour downtime during cutover
  • Development team: 20 engineers (Java, MySQL expertise)
  • Operations team: 5 engineers (limited cloud experience)

QUESTION:
Based on the CTO's constraints and the business requirements for daily deployments and scalability, which migration strategy should you recommend for the application tier?

GCP PCA · Question 02 · Domain 2: Managing and Provisioning a Solution Infrastructure

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming

Company Overview:
TechStream Gaming is a global gaming company with 500 employees and $100M in annual revenue. They develop multiplayer online games.

Current Technical Environment:

  • On-premises data centers in US and EU
  • 200 servers (mix of Windows and Linux)
  • MySQL databases (5 TB total)
  • Peak concurrent users: 2 million
  • Current monthly infrastructure cost: $100K

Business Requirements:

  • Reduce infrastructure costs by 40%
  • Support 5x user growth over 2 years
  • Launch in 3 new regions (APAC, SA, Africa)
  • Improve deployment speed (current: 1 week -> target: daily)

Executive Statements:

  • CEO: "We need to scale rapidly to compete with larger gaming companies. Cloud migration is critical to our growth strategy."
  • CFO: "Cost reduction is paramount. We cannot exceed $60K/month in cloud costs. ROI must be achieved within 18 months."
  • CTO: "Our team has limited cloud experience. We need a solution that doesn't require extensive retraining. Reliability is non-negotiable - 99.95% uptime minimum."

Technical Requirements:

  • Sub-100ms latency for players globally
  • Real-time analytics on player behavior
  • Seasonal traffic spikes (5x during holidays)
  • DDoS protection
  • CI/CD pipeline for daily deployments

Constraints:

  • Migration must complete in 12 months
  • Cannot exceed 4-hour downtime during cutover
  • Development team: 20 engineers (Java, MySQL expertise)
  • Operations team: 5 engineers (limited cloud experience)

QUESTION:
To meet the technical requirements for global latency and security, how should you design the network ingress architecture?

Answer options:

A.

Deploy Regional Network Load Balancers in each of the 5 regions and use Cloud DNS geolocation routing.

B.

Implement Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancing with Cloud CDN and Cloud Armor enabled.

C.

Use Cloud VPN to connect the regions and route all traffic through a centralized third-party WAF appliance in the US.

D.

Implement Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing with Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) for secure access.

How to approach this question

Identify the key network requirements: global reach (5 regions), low latency (<100ms), and DDoS protection. Global HTTP(S) LB provides the global anycast IP. Cloud CDN helps with latency. Cloud Armor provides DDoS protection.

Full Answer

B.Implement Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancing with Cloud CDN and Cloud Armor enabled.✓ Correct
The Global External HTTP(S) Load Balancer is a core GCP networking component that uses Google's global edge network to route users to the closest healthy backend. Integrating Cloud Armor directly onto this load balancer fulfills the DDoS protection requirement, and Cloud CDN helps achieve the latency goals.

Common mistakes

Selecting DNS routing (A) is a common pattern in AWS (Route53), but in GCP, the Global Load Balancer is the preferred and more powerful approach for global HTTP traffic.

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