IP Strategy for Expanding Global Services
Question
Case Study - Company Overview - HipLocal is a community application designed to facilitate communication between people in close proximity.
It is used for event planning and organizing sporting events, and for businesses to connect with their local communities.
HipLocal launched recently in a few neighborhoods in Dallas and is rapidly growing into a global phenomenon.
Its unique style of hyper-local community communication and business outreach is in demand around the world.
Executive Statement - We are the number one local community app; it's time to take our local community services global.
Our venture capital investors want to see rapid growth and the same great experience for new local and virtual communities that come online, whether their members are 10 or 10000 miles away from each other.
Solution Concept - HipLocal wants to expand their existing service, with updated functionality, in new regions to better serve their global customers.
They want to hire and train a new team to support these regions in their time zones.
They will need to ensure that the application scales smoothly and provides clear uptime data.
Existing Technical Environment - HipLocal's environment is a mix of on-premises hardware and infrastructure running in Google Cloud Platform.
The HipLocal team understands their application well, but has limited experience in global scale applications.
Their existing technical environment is as follows: " Existing APIs run on Compute Engine virtual machine instances hosted in GCP.
" State is stored in a single instance MySQL database in GCP.
" Data is exported to an on-premises Teradata/Vertica data warehouse.
" Data analytics is performed in an on-premises Hadoop environment.
" The application has no logging.
" There are basic indicators of uptime; alerts are frequently fired when the APIs are unresponsive.
Business Requirements - HipLocal's investors want to expand their footprint and support the increase in demand they are seeing.
Their requirements are: " Expand availability of the application to new regions.
" Increase the number of concurrent users that can be supported.
" Ensure a consistent experience for users when they travel to different regions.
" Obtain user activity metrics to better understand how to monetize their product.
" Ensure compliance with regulations in the new regions (for example, GDPR)
" Reduce infrastructure management time and cost.
" Adopt the Google-recommended practices for cloud computing.
Technical Requirements - " The application and backend must provide usage metrics and monitoring.
" APIs require strong authentication and authorization.
" Logging must be increased, and data should be stored in a cloud analytics platform.
" Move to serverless architecture to facilitate elastic scaling.
" Provide authorized access to internal apps in a secure manner.
HipLocal has connected their Hadoop infrastructure to GCP using Cloud Interconnect in order to query data stored on persistent disks.
Which IP strategy should they use?
Answers
Explanations
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Based on the given technical environment and requirements, HipLocal is looking to expand their application to new regions, increase the number of concurrent users, ensure a consistent experience for users, obtain user activity metrics, ensure compliance with regulations, reduce infrastructure management time and cost, and adopt Google-recommended practices for cloud computing.
To achieve this, HipLocal needs to address several technical requirements, such as strong authentication and authorization, logging, monitoring, and elastic scaling. One of the technical requirements is to move to a serverless architecture to facilitate elastic scaling. This implies that HipLocal needs to adopt a cloud-native approach to application development, where the application is broken down into small, independent, and scalable components that run in a serverless environment.
When migrating to a serverless architecture, it is recommended to use multiple VPCs to isolate and secure different components of the application. Each VPC can have its own set of subnets that can be used to group resources by function, availability zone, or security requirements. The VPCs can be peered to enable communication between them while keeping traffic within the Google Cloud network.
In this context, the recommended IP strategy for HipLocal is to create multiple peered VPCs. This approach will provide isolation and security for different components of the application while enabling communication between them. It will also enable HipLocal to scale their application in a more granular way and ensure compliance with regulations in different regions by keeping the data within the appropriate VPCs.
Creating manual subnets or an auto mode subnet may not provide the required isolation and security for different components of the application. Provisioning a single instance for NAT may not be sufficient to handle the increased demand and could become a bottleneck.
In summary, HipLocal should create multiple peered VPCs as their IP strategy to achieve their business and technical requirements while adopting a cloud-native approach to application development.
