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.
You analyzed TerramEarth's business requirement to reduce downtime, and found that they can achieve a majority of time saving by reducing customers' wait time for parts.
You decided to focus on reduction of the 3 weeks aggregate reporting time.
Which modifications to the company's processes should you recommend?
You need to set up Microsoft SQL Server on GCP. Management requires that there's no downtime in case of a data center outage in any of the zones within a GCP region. What should you do?
For this question, refer to the JencoMart case study.
JencoMart has built a version of their application on Google Cloud Platform that serves traffic to Asia. You want to measure success against their business and technical goals. Which metrics should you track?
Case Study: 7 - Mountkirk Games
Company Overview
Mountkirk Games makes online, session-based, multiplayer games for mobile platforms. They build all of their games using some server-side integration. Historically, they have used cloud providers to lease physical servers.
Due to the unexpected popularity of some of their games, they have had problems scaling their global audience, application servers, MySQL databases, and analytics tools.
Their 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.
Solution Concept
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.
Business Requirements
Increase to a global footprint.
* Improve uptime - downtime is loss of players.
* Increase efficiency of the cloud resources we use.
* Reduce latency to all customers.
* Technical Requirements
Requirements for Game Backend Platform
Dynamically scale up or down based on game activity.
* Connect to a transactional database service to manage user profiles and game state.
* Store game activity in a timeseries database service for future analysis.
* As the system scales, ensure that data is not lost due to processing backlogs.
* Run hardened Linux distro.
* Requirements for 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 queries to access at least 10 TB of historical data
* Process files that are regularly uploaded by users' mobile devices
* Executive Statement
Our last successful game did not scale well with our previous cloud provider, resulting in lower user adoption and affecting the game's reputation. Our investors want more key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the speed and stability of the game, as well as other metrics that provide deeper insight into usage patterns so we can adapt the game to target users.
Additionally, our current technology stack cannot provide the scale we need, so we want to replace MySQL and move to an environment that provides autoscaling, low latency load balancing, and frees us up from managing physical servers.
For this question, refer to the Mountkirk Games case study. You are in charge of the new Game Backend Platform architecture. The game communicates with the backend over a REST API.
You want to follow Google-recommended practices. How should you design the backend?
You write a Python script to connect to Google BigQuery from a Google Compute Engine virtual machine. The script is printing errors that it cannot connect to BigQuery. What should you do to fix the script?
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