Sample Case Studies

Question 1

JencoMart - Give an overview

Answer 1

• think Cosco, 10,000 stores in 16 countries
• core value is excellent customer service
• is environmentally aware, interested in reducing costs
• older company, since 1931, now 25% business is online with hybrid solutions
• interested in growth to Asia market
• self-hosted infrastructure, on-premise and/or data-center lease, equipment is end of life
• Current hosts located in 4 data centers: 3 in North America and 1 in Europe
• Application: a ‘Customer Loyalty’ portal
• Stack: LAMP from 2 US data-centers, Oracle for user profiles, Postgres for user credentials, 30 2x VM’s on West coast, 20 1x VM’s on East coast
• Storage: access to 100 TB SAN in each location, weekly tape backup

Question 2

JencoMart - What are the business requirements?

Answer 2

• Optimize for capacity during peak periods and value during off-peak periods.
• Guarantee service availability and support.
• Reduce on-premises footprint and associated financial and environmental impact.
• Move to outsourcing model to avoid large upfront costs associated with infrastructure purchase.
• Expand services into Asia.

Question 3

JencoMart - What are the Technical Requirements?

Answer 3

• Assess key application for cloud suitability.
• Modify applications for the cloud.
• Move applications to a new infrastructure.
• Leverage managed services wherever feasible.
• Sunset 20% of capacity in existing data centers.
• Decrease latency in Asia.

Question 4

JencoMart - Executive statements, points of view

Answer 4

CEO: global market future, online usability, environmentally friendly/focused

CTO: allow focus on Big Data and Machine Learning to improve services

CFO: increasing customer demand during peak periods and reduce costs during off-peak periods

Question 5

Mountkirk Games - Give an overview

Answer 5

• Mountkirk Games makes online, session-based, multiplayer games for the most popular mobile platforms.
• Mountkirk Games builds all of their games with some server-side integration, and has historically used cloud providers to lease physical servers. A few of their games were more popular than expected, and they had problems scaling their application servers, MySQL databases, and analytics tools.
• Mountkirk’s current model is to write game statistics to files and send them through an ETL tool that loads them into a centralized MySQL database for reporting.

Question 6

Mountkirk Games - What is the solution concept?

Answer 6

Mountkirk Games is building a new game, which they expect to be very popular.

They plan to deploy the game’s backend on Google Compute Engine so they can capture streaming metrics, run intensive analytics, and take advantage of its autoscaling server environment and integrate with a managed NoSQL database.

Question 7

Mountkirk Games - What are the Technical Requirements?

Answer 7

Game Backend Platform:
- Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
- Connect to a managed NoSQL database service.
- Run customized Linux distro.

Game Analytics Platform:
- Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
- Process incoming data on the fly directly from the game servers.
- Process data that arrives late because of slow mobile networks.
- Allow SQL queries to access at least 10 TB of historical data.
- Process files that are regularly uploaded by users’ mobile devices.
- Use only fully managed services.

Question 8

Mountkirk Games - What are the Executive statement summaries?

Answer 8

CEO: ability to scale is critical, KPI’s and analysis of game speed and stability to adapt game

CTO: scalability concern with mysql, server maintenance

CFO: we are not capturing enough data to target the right users