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Google Cloud Storage

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By komidawi 10 min read

Google Cloud

VPC

  • Provides networking to Compute Engine VMs, Kubernetes Engine containers and App Engine flexible environment
    • It implies that without VPC one can’t create VMs, containers or App Engine apps
    • Each GCP project has a default network
  • VPC can be perceived like a physical network virtualized then within Google Cloud
  • It’s a global resource consisting of regional virtual subnets in data centers, all connected by global WAN
    • Each subnet is associated with a given region and a private CIDR block for internal IP address range and a gateway
  • VPC networks are logically isolated from each other

Commands 🔨

Container images 🔨

  • Build container image using Cloud Build (invoke it in directory with Dockerfile)
    • gcloud builds submit --tag gcr.io/$GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT/helloworld
  • List all the container images associated with current project
    • gcloud container images list
  • Register gcloud as the credential helper for all Google-supported Docker registries
    • gcloud auth configure-docker
  • Start app locally from Cloud Shell
    • docker run -d -p 8080:8080 gcr.io/$GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT/helloworld
  • Deploy containerized app to Cloud Run
    • gcloud run deploy --image gcr.io/$GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT/helloworld --allow-unauthenticated --region=$LOCATION
    • The allow-unauthenticated flag in the command above makes your service publicly accessible.
  • You can delete GCP project to avoid incurring charges (it will stop billing for all the resources used within that project), or just delete the image:
    • gcloud container images delete gcr.io/$GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT/helloworld
  • To delete the Cloud Run service run:
    • gcloud run services delete helloworld --region=us-west1

Buckets 🔨

  1. Create a new bucket
    • gcloud storage buckets create -l $LOCATION gs://$DEVSHELL_PROJECT_ID
  2. Get a png from a public bucket
    • gcloud storage cp gs://cloud-training/gcpfci/my-excellent-blog.png my-excellent-blog.png
  3. Copy png to the own bucket
    • gcloud storage cp my-excellent-blog.png gs://$DEVSHELL_PROJECT_ID/my-excellent-blog.png
  4. Make it readable by everyone
    • gsutil acl ch -u allUsers:R gs://$DEVSHELL_PROJECT_ID/my-excellent-blog.png

Storage Options

See separate article here.

Database concepts

Entity

  1. Data objects are called Entities
  2. Entities consists one or more properties
  3. Each entity has a key defining it uniquely having:
    • Namespace
    • Entity kind
    • Identifier (string or number)
    • [Optional] Ancestor path
  4. Operations on one ore more Entities are Transactions, which are atomic

Cloud Foundation Toolkit (CFT)

TODO: See what’s that as it seems to be nice

Compute Offerings

Compute Engine

  • IaaS product that consists of: Compute, Network, Storage
    • Similar to physical data centers
  • Predefined and customized VMs
  • Storage options:
    • Persistent disks
    • Local SSDs
  • Workloads can be placed behind global Load Balancers which support autoscaling
    • You can create Instance Groups, where resources can be defined to automatically meet demand
  • Per-second billing
    • Low costs for rare, batch operations
  • Preemptible VMs
    • For workloads, that can be safely interrupted
  • Popular choice for devs:
    • Complete control over the infrastructure
    • Operating systems can be customized
    • Can run apps requiring many different operating systems
    • On-premise workloads can be easily moved to cloud without need to rewrite
    • Fine option when other options don’t support app or other requirements

GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine)

  • Runs containerized apps
  • Cluster contains control plane and worker nodes
  • Nodes are machines (physical or virtual ones)
  • Nodes contain Pods
  • Pod is a group of containers sharing network and storage resources within the same node

App Engine

  • Fully managed PaaS product
  • Bind code to the libraries that provide access to the infrastructure application needs
  • You can upload code and App Engine will deploy required infrastructure
  • Supports popular programming languages
  • Can run containers
  • Integrated with Cloud Tools (Monitoring, Logging, Profiler, Error Reporting)
  • Supports version control and traffic splitting
  • Good choice when:
    • You want to focus on writing code
    • Don’t need to build a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure
    • Don’t want to focus on deploying and managing environment
    • Examples: Websites, mobile app and gaming backends, method of presenting a RESTful API

Cloud Functions

  • FaaS product
  • Lightweight, event-based, asynchronous compute solution
  • Create small, single-purpose functions without need to manage environment
  • Billed to 100ms (only when running)
  • Use cases:
    • Part of microservice architecture
    • Simple, serverless mobile or IoT backends or integrations with 3rd party services and APIs
    • Real-time Cloud Storage files processing
    • Part of intelligence systems (like virtual assistants, video or image analysis, sentiment analysis)

Cloud Run

  • Managed compute platform that runs stateless containers via web requests or Pub/Sub events
  • Serverless, no infrastructure management
  • Built on Knative (an API and runtime environment built on Kubernetes)
  • It scales very quickly, near instantaneously, and you pay only for what you used
    • (but it still may charge you for storing container images)
  • Billed for resources, 100ms rounding
  • You can use both container-based and sourcecode-based workflow
    • Source code approach deploys the source code (instead of container image) Cloud run then builds and packages the image (using Buildpacks)

Billing

How not to become bankrupt

  1. Budget
    • Setup Budget with a fixed limit or tied to some metric
      • (e.g. percentage of previous month spend)
  2. Alerts
    • Above x% or above $n
  3. Reports
    • Monitor expenditure by project or services
  4. Quotas
    • Prevent from over-consumption due to attack or failure
    • Rate Quotas
      • Reset after a specific time
      • Example: GKE 3000 calls to API from each GCP project every 100s
    • Allocation Quotas
      • Number of resources you can have
      • Example: No more than 5 VPC networks

Virtualization options

Local computer

Requirements:

  • Physical space
  • Power
  • Cooling
  • Network Connectivity

Things managed manually:

  • Operating system
  • Software dependencies
  • Application

Every bulk change require to go from desk to desk and repeat things over again

Scaling options:

  • Add more computers manually
    • and configure everything manually

Resources:

  • Whole computers were dedicated for a single purpose

Virtual Machine (VM)

  • Makes possible to run multiple virtual servers and operating systems on a single physical machine
  • You can easily move VM from one computer to another
  • Still required manual intervention for configuration and updates
  • Booting OS still takes a while
  • Applications that share dependencies are not isolated from each other
    • Failure of one of them may drain all resources for everyone
    • Upgrade of dependency may cause some apps to stop working
    • The solution would be to run two separate VMs for two apps
      • However this approach is limiting benefits VMs give us compared to sheer physical machines

Containers

  • Virtualizing only user space, not the entire machine or entire OS
  • The user space is code residing above the kernel - especially apps and their dependencies
  • That code also is packaged along with its dependencies
  • Containers don’t boot an entire VM - there are only processes started, so it’s quick to run up or down
  • Code runs the same way on local dev and production machines, no need for sophisticated configuration

Kubernetes

Pod

  • The smallest unit that can be created or deployed
  • Represents a running process on the cluster as an app or a component of an app
  • Usually there is one container in one Pod
    • However you can package multiple dependencies into a single Pod and share networking and storage resources between them
  • Pod provides a unique network IP and set of ports
  • One way to run a container in a Pod is kubectl run (which starts a Deployment)

Deployment

  • Deployment represents a group of replicas of the same Pod
    • it also keeps Pods running even when nodes they run on fail
  • Deployment can represent a component of an application or even an entire app

Service

  • Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy of access to them
  • Service has fixed IP (unlike ephemeral IP of Pods)

K8s overview

K8s overview

Kubernetes Object Model

  • Each item managed by K8s is represented by an object, which can be viewed and its attributes and state can be changed
  • An object is defined as a persistent entity representing state of something running on a cluster: its desired state (object spec) and its current state (object status)
  • There are different Kinds of objects: containerized applications, resources, policies
  • Pods are foundational building blocks
  • Every running container is in a Pod
  • Pod creates environment where one or more containers live (sharing resources like network and storage)
  • Each Pod has unique IP, and containers within a Pod share network namespace (IP address and network ports)
    • They can communicate through localhost

Control Plane 📜

  • kube-API server
    • The only component to interact with directly
    • Accepts commands that view or change state of a cluster, like launching pods
  • kubectl
    • Connects to kube-API server and interacts with it
    • Authenticates and authorizes incoming requests
  • etcd
    • Cluster’s database
    • Store configuration data and dynamic information like node info, what and where Pods should be running
  • kube-scheduler
    • Schedules Pods onto the Nodes
    • Analyzes requirements of each Pod and finds the most suitable Node
      • Requirements are like software, hardware, policy, affinity (Pods on the same Node), anti-affinity (no Pods on the same Node)
    • It only chooses Pods/Nodes, it does not launch it
  • kube-controller-manager
    • Component of a broader job
    • Monitors the state of a cluster through kube-APIserver
    • Makes changes to match desired state
    • btw “controller” here means that there’s a code loop
      • Other controllers can be e.g. Node controller
  • kube-cloud-manager
    • Manages controllers interacting with underlying cloud providers
    • Example: running K8s cluster on Compute Engine - then it would bring Google Cloud features like Load Balancers and Storage Volumes

Nodes

  • kubelet
    • Each Node runs a kubelet, a small set of control-plane components
    • It can be perceived as a K8s agent
    • When kube-APIserver wats to start a Pod on a Node, it connects to Node’s kubelet
  • kube-proxy
    • Maintains network connectivity with Pods in a cluster
    • Things like firewalls, iptables

Commands 🔨

  • Connecting kubectl to GKE cluster
    • gcloud container clusters get-credentials [CLUSTER_NAME] --region [REGION_NAME]
  • Some basic commands
    • kubectl get pods
    • kubectl describe pod [POD_NAME]
    • kubectl exec [POD_NAME] -- [command]
      • -it runs interactive shell, so you can work inside the container
    • kubectl logs [POD_NAME]
  • Create kubeconfig file (containing credentials for authentication, providing endpoint details for a given cluster and enabling kubectl communication):
    • gcloud container clusters get-credentials $my_cluster --region $my_region
    • It creates kubeconfig file located in ~/.kube/config
    • BTW: This file can contain info of many clusters. You can check current context with current-context property
  • Print kubeconfig
    • kubectl config view
  • Print cluster info
    • kubectl cluster-info
  • Print info of all contexts for kubeconfig
    • kubectl config get-contexts
  • Change active context
    • kubectl config use-context gke_${GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT}_us-central1_autopilot-cluster-1
  • View resource usage of nodes in the cluster
    • kubectl top nodes
  • View resource usage of pods in the cluster
    • kubectl top pods
  • View details of services in the cluster
    • kubectl get services
  • Enable bash autocompletion for kubectl
    • source <(kubectl completion bash)
  • deploy nginx as a Pod named nginx-one:
    • kubectl create deployment --image nginx nginx-one
  • Copy file
    • kubectl cp ~/test.html $my_nginx_pod:/usr/share/nginx/html/test.html
  • Create a service and expose Pod outside the cluster
    • kubectl expose pod $my_nginx_pod --port 80 --type LoadBalancer
  • Set port forwarding from Cloud Shell to nginx Pod
    • kubectl port-forward $another_nginx_pod 10081:80
    • This is an easier way to connect to and test container,the other one would be to create a service
  • Display and stream logs
    • kubectl logs $another_nginx_pod -f --timestamps

Summary

Other

AppEngine vs Cloud Run

Naming Best Practices

Legend

🔨 - paragraph with higher amount of practical information

📜 - paragraph with information worth to pay attention to

Sources

Getting Started With Application Development
https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/paths/19/course_templates/22

Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine
https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/paths/19/course_templates/2

Getting Started with Terraform for Google Cloud
https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/443

Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/paths/14/course_templates/60

App Deployment, Debugging, and Performance
https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/43

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