Vehicle Analytics Cloud Technical Assessment

This assessment is part of the Vehicle Analytics (VA) technical assessment.
It is a theoretical cloud architecture task – you will not be writing or running code here.

---

Key Concepts

• Design a scalable cloud architecture.
• Integrate new data sources into an existing Vehicle Analytics platform.
• Justify design decisions, including budget, security, performance, scalability, and operability.
• Describe how you would use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) (e.g. Terraform, AWS CDK) conceptually.

---

Scenario

The Vehicle Analytics team wants to implement a local weather station collection system so race engineers can correlate local weather data with vehicle performance and telemetry.

The team currently uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy and run their systems.

The weather station will be set up on track days to monitor:

• Ambient temperature and humidity
• Track temperature
• Wind speed and direction

It is offboard the car and therefore requires its own solution to connect with the AWS-based Vehicle Analytics cloud streaming/processing services.

Below is the current cloud architectural diagram adapted for the Vehicle Analytics system:

Your job is to extend or adjust this architecture to integrate the weather station as a first-class data source in the VA platform.

---

Tasks

Investigate and propose a change or addition that would allow weather-station data to be integrated into the Vehicle Analytics cloud system.

You are expected to submit a PDF document which includes:

• An updated architecture diagram showing what the system would look like.
  • You may edit the existing cloud_diagram.drawio file (use draw.io), or create a new diagram.
• A written explanation of how you would implement it, including:
  • Data ingestion path(s) from the weather station into the cloud.
  • Processing, storage, and access patterns for weather data.
  • How this integrates with existing telemetry/log systems.

You do not have to implement this system; however, you may reference IaC examples (Terraform, CDK, etc.) conceptually where you see fit.

Be prepared (in an interview) to walk through and justify your implementation.

---

Considerations

• This is a free-form assessment. You can design the cloud solution in any way you see fit, including adjusting the diagram above.
• You can design the weather station to transmit data in any protocol you see fit.
• You may:
  • Adapt current ECS/compute clusters to suit your solution, or
  • Create new services dedicated to weather ingestion and processing.
• The Vehicle Analytics team uses Infrastructure as Code (for example, Terraform or AWS CDK) to deploy systems. In your PDF and justification.md, describe how you would use IaC to deploy the services required for the weather station (conceptually only).
• The team uses Docker to containerise applications. Consider how containerisation might be used for:
  • Cloud services (e.g. ingestion, processing APIs).
  • Any on-site gateway or edge component (if you choose to introduce one).
• Consider where weather station data can be stored and how it will be queried alongside:
  • Telemetry streams.
  • Log files (currently stored in S3 buckets).

As an additional reference, you may use the following high-level software flow diagram, which shows how data moves from the car to the cloud. You can draw inspiration from this when designing how weather data flows through the system:

---

Deliverables

You should provide:

1. A PDF document that includes:
   • An updated architecture diagram (exported from cloud_diagram.drawio or a new diagram).
   • A written explanation of your architecture and key decisions.
2. A filled-in justification.md in this repository.

---

What to put in justification.md

Use justification.md to briefly document:

• High-level architecture overview.
• How the weather station integrates into the existing Vehicle Analytics platform.
• Key design decisions (e.g. services chosen, data flow, networking, security).
• Trade-offs (cost vs. performance, complexity vs. flexibility, etc.).
• How you would use IaC (Terraform, AWS CDK, or other) at a high level to provision this design.

---

Helpful resources

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• AWS Architecture Center
• Terraform documentation
• AWS CDK documentation
• Draw.io (diagrams.net)