Modernize Infrastructure and Applications with Google Cloud practice questions

Discovery and assessment is the first migration phase: inventory workloads, map dependencies and usage, then decide the approach and estimate cost for each.

The retailer is gathering facts about what it runs today so it can decide and budget. That is discovery (find and catalog) and assessment (analyze and decide). Rehost, refactor and retain are approaches that assessment chooses between afterwards.

1. Notice nothing is being moved yet.
2. Identify the work as cataloguing applications, dependencies and usage.
3. Match it to the phase that precedes every migration approach.

Exam tip: Discover and assess first; choose rehost, replatform, refactor, retain or retire afterwards.

Assessment turns an inventory into decisions: dependencies drive which workloads move together, and usage drives sizing and cost estimates.

Without dependency data, a team can move one application and break another that still calls it on premises. Usage data stops the team from copying oversized servers into the cloud and lets it build a business case. The distractors describe later steps (containerizing, wave sequencing) or an unsafe shortcut.

1. Ask what the mapping produces: dependencies and utilization.
2. Link dependencies to grouping workloads into waves.
3. Link utilization to right-sizing and cost estimates.
4. Reject options that describe a different migration step.

Exam tip: Dependency maps decide what moves together; usage data decides size and cost.

Retire means decommissioning workloads that are no longer needed; assessment often finds several.

The application has no users and its function is duplicated, so the cheapest and simplest outcome is to switch it off. Every other approach spends money keeping it alive, on premises or in the cloud.

1. Check whether the workload is still used.
2. Check whether another system already covers its function.
3. If neither, decommission rather than move.

Exam tip: No users and a replacement in place means retire, not migrate.

Retain means keeping a workload where it is for now, because of a constraint such as regulation, recent investment or low migration value.

The regulation keeps this workload on premises, and the new servers make staying cheap. Retaining it is a deliberate, temporary decision; the organization can revisit it when the rule or the hardware changes. Retire, rehost and refactor each break the stated constraint.

1. Find the constraint: the regulation keeps the workload on site.
2. Note the extra reason: servers recently bought.
3. Pick the approach that keeps it in place without switching it off.

Exam tip: Retain is keep-for-now, with a reason and a review date; retire is switch-off.

Retain applies when a workload has a good reason to stay where it is for now; retire applies when it is no longer needed.

Regulation and recent investment are both reasons to keep a workload in place temporarily. An unused application is a retire candidate. A standard OS and spiky traffic are reasons that make migrating easier or more valuable.

1. For each finding, ask whether it argues for staying, leaving or switching off.
2. Keep the two that argue for staying for now.
3. Classify the unused application as retire.
4. Classify easy-to-move and elastic workloads as migration candidates.

Exam tip: Retain needs a reason to stay; retire needs a reason to stop.

Rehost (lift and shift) moves a workload to the cloud unchanged; it is the fastest migration approach.

A hard deadline and a requirement not to change the applications both point to rehosting. Replatform, refactor and reimagine each add change and time. The company can still modernize after it has left the data center.

1. Find the deciding constraints: speed and no changes.
2. Rank the approaches from least change to most change.
3. Pick the least-change approach that still moves the workload.

Exam tip: Deadline plus 'no changes' means rehost: lift and shift first, modernize later.