11.9.2: Critical Thinking Questions

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Storage Architecture Design: A media company manages 500TB of video content. New videos are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, occasionally for the next year, and rarely after that (but must be retained for 7 years). Design a storage tiering strategy using cloud services. Calculate the approximate cost difference between keeping all data in standard storage vs. implementing lifecycle policies.
2. Consistency vs. Performance: You are designing a global e-commerce platform with users in North America, Europe, and Asia. Product catalog reads happen 1000x more often than writes. Shopping cart operations require strong consistency. Analyze what consistency model you would use for each data type (catalog, cart, user profiles, order history) and justify your choices.
3. SQL vs. NoSQL Decision: A startup is building a new application with the following data needs: user profiles (structured, relational), activity feed (high-write-volume, time-series), product recommendations (graph relationships), and session data (key-value, ephemeral). Should they use one database for everything or multiple specialized databases? Argue your position considering operational complexity, cost, and performance.
4. Data Sovereignty: A multinational company must comply with GDPR (EU data must stay in EU) and similar regulations in other regions. How does this affect their cloud data management strategy? Consider database replication, backup locations, analytics pipelines, and the choice between a single global database vs. regional databases.