Case Study: 2 - TerramEarth Case Study
Company Overview
TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries: About
80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.
Company Background
TerramEarth formed in 1946, when several small, family owned companies combined to retool after World War II. The company cares about their employees and customers and considers them to be extended members of their family.
TerramEarth is proud of their ability to innovate on their core products and find new markets as their customers' needs change. For the past 20 years trends in the industry have been largely toward increasing productivity by using larger vehicles with a human operator.
Solution Concept
There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second.
Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced.
The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.
Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second, with 22 hours of operation per day.
TerramEarth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.
Existing Technical Environment
TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux-based systems that reside in a data center. These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, transform and aggregate them, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.
With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.
Business Requirements
- Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week, without
increasing the cost of carrying surplus inventory
- Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use
their equipment IP better position new products and services.
- Have the ability to partner with different companies-especially with
seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural
business-to create compelling joint offerings for their customers
CEO Statement
We have been successful in capitalizing on the trend toward larger vehicles to increase the productivity of our customers. Technological change is occurring rapidly and TerramEarth has taken advantage of connected devices technology to provide our customers with better services, such as our intelligent farming equipment. With this technology, we have been able to increase farmers' yields by 25%, by using past trends to adjust how our vehicles operate. These advances have led to the rapid growth of our agricultural product line, which we expect will generate 50% of our revenues by 2020.
CTO Statement
Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process with our ability to build better vehicles for tower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. Unfortunately, our CEO doesn't take technology obsolescence seriously and he considers the many new companies in our industry to be niche players. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.
For this question, refer to the TerramEarth case study. TerramEarth has equipped unconnected trucks with servers and sensors to collet telemetry data. Next year they want to use the data to train machine learning models. They want to store this data in the cloud while reducing costs.
What should they do?
Your organization requires that metrics from all applications be retained for 5 years for future analysis in possible legal proceedings. Which approach should you use?
One of your primary business objectives is being able to trust the data stored in your application. You want to log all changes to the application data. How can you design your logging system to verify authenticity of your logs?
Mountkirk Games wants you to design their new testing strategy. How should the test coverage differ from
their existing backends on the other platforms?
Case Study: 4 - Dress4Win case study
Company Overview
Dress4win is a web-based company that helps their users organize and manage their personal wardrobe using a website and mobile application. The company also cultivates an active social network that connects their users with designers and retailers. They monetize their services through advertising, e-commerce, referrals, and a freemium app model.
Company Background
Dress4win's application has grown from a few servers in the founder's garage to several hundred servers and appliances in a colocated data center. However, the capacity of their infrastructure is now insufficient for the application's rapid growth. Because of this growth and the company's desire to innovate faster, Dress4win is committing to a full migration to a public cloud.
Solution Concept
For the first phase of their migration to the cloud, Dress4win is considering moving their development and test environments. They are also considering building a disaster recovery site, because their current infrastructure is at a single location. They are not sure which components of their architecture they can migrate as is and which components they need to change before migrating them.
Existing Technical Environment
The Dress4win application is served out of a single data center location.
Databases:
MySQL - user data, inventory, static data
Redis - metadata, social graph, caching
Application servers:
Tomcat - Java micro-services
Nginx - static content
Apache Beam - Batch processing
Storage appliances:
iSCSI for VM hosts
Fiber channel SAN - MySQL databases
NAS - image storage, logs, backups
Apache Hadoop/Spark servers:
Data analysis
Real-time trending calculations
MQ servers:
Messaging
Social notifications
Events
Miscellaneous servers:
Jenkins, monitoring, bastion hosts, security scanners
Business Requirements
Build a reliable and reproducible environment with scaled parity of production. Improve security by defining and adhering to a set of security and Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices for cloud.
Improve business agility and speed of innovation through rapid provisioning of new resources.
Analyze and optimize architecture for performance in the cloud. Migrate fully to the cloud if all other requirements are met.
Technical Requirements
Evaluate and choose an automation framework for provisioning resources in cloud. Support failover of the production environment to cloud during an emergency. Identify production services that can migrate to cloud to save capacity.
Use managed services whenever possible.
Encrypt data on the wire and at rest.
Support multiple VPN connections between the production data center and cloud environment.
CEO Statement
Our investors are concerned about our ability to scale and contain costs with our current infrastructure. They are also concerned that a new competitor could use a public cloud platform to offset their up-front investment and freeing them to focus on developing better features.
CTO Statement
We have invested heavily in the current infrastructure, but much of the equipment is approaching the end of its useful life. We are consistently waiting weeks for new gear to be racked before we can start new projects. Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle.
CFO Statement
Our capital expenditure is now exceeding our quarterly projections. Migrating to the cloud will likely cause an initial increase in spending, but we expect to fully transition before our next hardware refresh cycle. Our total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis over the next 5 years puts a cloud strategy between 30 to 50% lower than our current model.
For this question, refer to the Dress4Win case study.
Dress4Win has asked you for advice on how to migrate their on-premises MySQL deployment to the cloud. They want to minimize downtime and performance impact to their on-premises solution during the migration. Which approach should you recommend?
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