#GlueCon 2013 Notes: Start Small & Go Big: Getting the Most From Google Compute Engine – Joe Beda, Google
Start Small & Go Big: Getting the Most From Google Compute Engine – Joe Beda, Google (@jbeda)
- Google Compute Engine is VMs, storage, and network
- It exposes Google’s DNA: scale, speed, secure, global expertise & experience
- All block devices are encrypted by default
- Virtual networks can be global (VM in US can talk to VM in Europe using Google’s lines, not Internet)
- No longer beta – now open to everyone
- Rounds to the nearest minute with 10 minute minimum, allowing for faster results by spreading out work to more VMs
- Increased volumes to 10TB on persistent disk, with root and hot attach/detach
- Virtual networking w/ Gateways and VPN support
- Early access program: load balancing and monitoring
- Cloud Datastore available via REST API – no longer a requirement to use Google App Engine to get access to it
- Instance Metadata – variables for VMs at launch with runtime update support
- Can be used to push SSH keys and other configs to VMs
- Data can be made project-wide, not just per-instance
- VM names are assigned DNS names, allowing VMs to find each other and gcutil CLI to use VM name
- Start Up Scripts to bootstrap, install chef/puppet, install packages, etc. – equiv to rc.local from the outside
- Can grab metadata and expose as env variables, used within the startup script, etc
- Can monitor startup scripts without SSHing to the VM using gcutil
- Avoid custom images whenever possible
- Suggest separating startup scripts into first time boot steps and every boot steps
- Service Accounts are synthetic accounts created for code, not people (like typical OAuth)
- e.g. download code from Google Storage, access app data in Cloud Datastore, using the compute API itself
- service account scopes are shorthand for providing access to resources within the project
- no configuration of passwords, reset every hour and can be refreshed using metadata server
- Can promote ephemeral IPs to static
- Can attach R/O disk to many VMs
- Google Compute Engine Fractal Demo (1 instance vs. cluster) – might be from http://gce-demos.appspot.com/
- Shows EA load balancer
- Built in Go
- Cloud Console is their web-based dashboard interface – shows REST API calls that will be executed (great for devs to learn APIs while using web console)
- No spot instance support yet, but for now (bigger) customers can talk with them to set something up