Who is EHR Healthcare - leading provider of EHR software to medical industry (SaaS to multi-national medical offices, hospitals, and insurance providers)
- Big company, medical industry, multi-national (regulations), hospitals/insurance (HIPAA)
Primary concerns
- Growing exponentially
- Scaling their environment
- Disaster recovery plan
- New continuous deployment
- Replace colocation facilities with GCP
Lay of the land (existing tech)
- Multiple colocation facilities; lease on one about to expire
- Apps are in containers; candidate for Kubernetes
- MySQL, MSSQL, Redis, Mongo DB
- Legacy integrations (no current plan to move short term)
- Users managed by Microsoft AD; monitoring via open source; email alerts often ignored
Business requirements
- Onboard new insurance providers ASAP
- Minimum 99.9% availability for customer apps
- Centralize visibility, proactive performance and usage
- Provide insights into healthcare trends (AI platform)
- Reduce latency for all customers
- Maintain regulatory compliance
- Decrease infra administration costs (can be handled through cloud computing)
- Make predictions and generate reports on industry trends based on provider data (models from external data sources)
Technical requirements
- Maintain legacy interfaces to insurance providers for both on-premisis systems and cloud providers
- Provide a consisten way to manage customer-facing, container-based applications (Anthos GKE)
- Security and high-perf connection between on-premises systems and GCP
- Consistent logging, log retention, monitoring, and alerting capabilities
- Maintain and managed multiple container-based environments
- Dynamically scale and provision new environments
- Create interfaces to ingest and process data from new providers (Dataproc or Dataflow)
Big picture (exec statement)
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Our on-prem strategy has worked for years but has required major investment of time and money in training our team on distinctly different systems, managing similar, but separate environments, and responding to outages.
- CapEx and OpEx way too high (too many diverse systems increasing mgmt and training costs)
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Many of these outages have been a result of misconfigured systems, inadequate capacity to manage spikes in traffic, and inconsisten monitoring practices.
- Too old or broken to deal with customer load; off/on monitoring; seeking change
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We want to use Google Cloud to leverage a scalable and resilient platform that can span multiple environments seamlessly and provide a consistent and stable user experience that positions us for future growth.
- They see light at end of tunnel which is Google Cloud, capable of handling legacy to modern
Key takeaways:
- governance and compliance play signicant role
- while dedicated to cloud computing, must maintain legacy integrations and high speed connections between GCP and on-prem
- attention to security concerns is strong thread, containers and protecting patient data
Who is Helicopter Racing League - HRL is a global sports league for competitive helicopter racing. Each year HRL holds the world championship and several regional league competitions where teams compete to earn a spot on the world championship. HRL offers a paid service to stream the races all over the world with live telemetry and predictions throughout the race.
- Global (covering lot of territory w/ lots of regional focus); cater to entire globe at one time, but also break down to smaller targeted services; commercial enterprise so uptime is important; gathering a lot of data in real time and analyzing and forecasting with it.
Primary concerns
- Migrate to new platform
- Expand use of AI and ML
- Fans in emerging regions
- Move service of content, real-time and recorded
- Closer to viewers to keep latency down
Lay of the land
- Already in the cloud (unnamed)
- Existing content stored in Object Storage service on cloud
- Video recording and editing handled at race tracks
- VMs for every job handle Video Encode/Transcode in cloud
- TensorFlow predictions run on other VMs in cloud
Business requirements
- Expose the predictive models to partners (API and private connectivity)
- Increase predictive capabilities during and before races
- Increase telemetry and create additional insights (enhance experience)
- Measure fan engagement and new predictions
- Enhance global availability and quality of broadcasts
- Increase the number of concurrent viewers (streaming capacity increase)
- Minimize operational complexity (standardize)
- Ensure compliance with regulations
- Create a merchandising revenue stream (e-comm app or connection to one)
Technical requirements
- Maintain or increase prediction throughput and accuracy (ramp up efficiency)
- Reduce viewer latency (get content closer to viewers)
- Increate transcoding performance (vertically scale up VMs)
- Create real-time analytics of viewer consumption patterns and engagement (streaming data and pipeline)
- Create data mart to enable processing of large volumes of race data (batch data)
Big picture (exec statement)
Our CEO, S. Hawke, wants to bring high-adrenaline racing to fans all around the world. We listen to our fans, and they want enhanced video streams that include predictions of events within the race (e.g., overtaking).
- Global, ramped up graphic processing, heavily data dependant and may include video analysis
Our current platform allows us to predict race outcomes but lacks the facility to support real-time predictions during races and the capacity to process season-long results.
- Streaming data analysis, batch analysis
Key takeaways:
- emphasizes numerous scenarios involving data predictions and forecasts that would entail significant use of AI and ML
- global org and intent on extending their reach and market while maintaining high quality and low latency
- HRL must process a tremendous amount of data in near real-time and output the results worldwide to specific regions
Who is Mountkirk Games - makes online, session-based, multiplayer games for mobile platforms. They have recently started expanding to other platforms after successfully migrating their on-premisis environments to Google Cloud. Their most recent endeavor is to create a retro-style first-person shooter (FPS) game that allows hundreds of simultanous players to join a geo-specific digital arena from multiple platforms and locations. A real-time digital banner will display a global leaderboard of all the top players across every active arena.
Primary concerns
- Building a new multiplayer game
- Want to use GKE
- Use global load balancer to keep latency down
- Keep global leader board in sync (streaming data)
- Willing to use Cloud Spanner as their database engine
Lay of the land
- Recently lift & shift 5 games to GCP
- Each game in own project under one folder (most permissions and network policies)
- Some legacy games with little traffic consolidated to single project
- Separate environments for development and testing
Business requirements
- Support multiple gaming platforms (from mobile only to multiple platforms)
- Support multiple regions (protect data and diff compliance regs)
- Support rapid iteration of game features (CICD)
- Minimize latency
- Optimize for dynamic scaling
- Use managed services and pooled resources (standardization)
- Minimize costs
Technical requirements
- Dynamically scale based on game activity
- Publish scoring data on near real-time global leaderboard
- Store game activity logs in structured files for future analysis
- Use GPU processing to render graphics server-side for multi-platform support
- Support eventual migration of legacy games to this new platform
Big picture (exec statement)
Our last game was the first time we used Google Cloud and it was a success. We were able to analyze player behavior and game telemetry in ways that we never could before. This success allowed us to bet on a full migration to the cloud and to start building all new games using cloud native design principles.
- See advantage reviewing user actions and game responses; going completely cloud native
Our new game is our most ambitious to date and will open doors for us to support more gaming platforms beyond mobile. Latency is our top priority, although cost management is the next most important challenge.
- Higher performance; lower cost
As with our first cloud-based game, we have grown to expect the cloud to enable advanced analytics capabilities so we can rapidly iterate on our deployments of bug fixes and new functionality.
- Double down on analytical approach that gave them an edge; invest in Cloud Spanner to achieve goals
Key takeaways
- Wants to expand reach to other gaming platforms and other regions of the world
- Very specific ideas on how to architect their next steps, including Kubernetes, Load Balancer, and Cloud Spanner
- Latency as top priority and cost management as second; happy users while keeping eye on bottom line
Who is TerramEarth - manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agriculture industries. They have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build product that make their customers more productive.
- Sophisticated earth-moving equipment; solid network; customer focused
Primary concerns
- 2 million TE vehicles in operation
- Collect telemetry data from many sensors (IoT)
- Subset of critical data in real time
- Rest of data collected, compressed, and uploaded daily
- 200-500MB of data per vehicle per day (1 PB each day)
Lay of the land
- Infra in GCP serving clients all around the world (data gathering and analysis)
- Private data center integration (2 main mfr plants sent to) with multiple Interconnects
Business requirements
- Predict and detect vehicle malfunction
- Ship parts to dealerships for just-in-time repair with little/no downtime
- Decrease cloud operational costs and adapt to seasonality
- Increase speed and reliability of developer workflow (SRE)
- Allow remote developers to productive without compromising code or data security
- Create flexible and scalable platform for custom API Services for dealers and partners (Apigee)
Technical requirements
- Create new abstraction layer for HTTP API access to legacy systems to enable a gradual migration without- disrupting operations (API gateway)
- Modernize all CI/CD pipelines to allow developers to deploy container-based workloads in highly scalable- environments (GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Build)
- Allow developers to experiment without compromising security and governance (new test project)
- Create a self-service portal for internal and partner developers to create new projects, request resources for- data analytics jobs, and centrally manage access to the API endpoints (secure new web front end with access to- spin up resources; network tags)
- Use cloud-native solutions for keys and secrets management and optimize for identity-based access (IAM, Secrets- Manager, and KMS)
- Improve and standardize tools necessary for application and network monitoring and troubleshooting (Cloud Operations: Monitoring, Logging, Debugging)
Big picture (exec statement)
Our advantage has always been our focus on the customer, with our ability to provide excellent customer service and minimize vehicle downtime. After moving multiple systems to Google Cloud, we are seeking new ways to provide best-in-class online fleet management services to our customers and improve operations of our dealerships.
- Customer is successful, they are; keeping vehicles operational leads to success; always improving
5-year strategic plan is to create a partner ecosystem of new products by enabling access to our data, increasing autonomous operation capabilities of our vehicles, and creating a path to move the remaining legacy systems to the cloud.
- Moving physical and digital information daily
Key takeaways
- places great emphasis on customer and partner support which requires consistent and secure communication between systems and devices
- after success of initial migration, TE seeks to expand their global integration without disrupting operations or regulations
- company's equipment must be able to transmit and analyze a great deal of telemetry data to maintain high-performance levels and just-in-time repairs
