James Higginbotham

API Architect

#GlueCon 2013 Notes: Start Small & Go Big: Getting the Most From Google Compute Engine – Joe Beda, Google

1 minute read

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

View the slides

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