TerramEarth plans to connect all 20 million vehicles in the field to the cloud. This increases the volume to 20 million 600 byte records a second for 40 TB an hour. How should you design the data ingestion?

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is the most suitable choice for this high-volume, real-time data ingestion scenario. It's a globally managed service designed for ingesting and delivering event streams at scale, handling millions of events per second with low latency. Its publish/subscribe model decouples senders (vehicles) from receivers, allowing for flexible and scalable processing. Directly writing to GCS is inefficient for real-time streaming of small, frequent records, as it's optimized for larger object storage. Streaming directly to BigQuery is not ideal for raw ingestion from edge devices; BigQuery is an analytical data warehouse, and Pub/Sub acts as a necessary buffer and streaming intermediary before BigQuery. Continuing with FTP is entirely unsuitable for real-time, high-volume data, as it lacks scalability, reliability, and real-time capabilities.