Deploying a Mostly Serverless Website on GCP

1

Google Cloud Storage

#Cloud Storage #Cloud Computing #Object Storage 36 social mentions

2

Google Cloud SQL

#Databases #Relational Databases #Tool 15 social mentions

3

Google Cloud Run

#Cloud Computing #Cloud Hosting #Development 82 social mentions

4

Google Cloud Load Balancing

Cloud Load Balancing for distribution.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy 10 social mentions

5

Google Cloud DNS

#Domain Name Registrar #Domain Names #DNS Services 5 social mentions

6

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

When exploring options on how to deploy the architecture we briefly considered Google Cloud Deployment Manager. Upon further investigation we were led to use Terraform instead. It was evident that Cloud Deployment Manager did not have the necessary support for the resource types that we were trying to create. Many of the supported resource types were still listed in beta.

#DevOps Tools #Infrastructure Build Tools #Continuous Integration 12 social mentions

7

Google Cloud CDN

Cloud CDN for distribution and caching.

#CDN #Cloud Computing #Content Distribution 11 social mentions

8

Google Cloud Build

We realized that if we did not automate code deployments our deployed resources would quickly become stale. In the continued spirit to try something new, we decided to use Google Cloud Build for our code automation. With the lack of our code changes this approach turned out to be free for us. We created a build trigger that would watch our GitHub repository and created a cloudbuild.yaml file that would configure the build job. The documentation claimed that just the Dockerfile was necessary, however, in practice we could not get that to work. We were required to create the yaml file for Cloud Build to successfully update the revision on Cloud Run.

#Continuous Integration #Continuous Deployment #DevOps Tools 15 social mentions

9

Google Cloud Platform

With the technology that we have today there are many options for hosting a website. We are particularly interested in Serverless Computing and opted to run our website in that fashion; well mostly. When we chose Google Cloud Platform, we were unable to find a serverless relational database system. Our Java Spring Boot application was constructed to use a relational database so shifting to another database offering wasn’t something we wanted to do at this time. The architecture that we chose to implement consisted of the following GCP services.

#Cloud Computing #Backend As A Service #Cloud Infrastructure 168 social mentions

10

Azure Cosmos DB

When debating the database solution for our application we were really seeking for a scalable serverless database that wouldn’t bill us for idle time. Options like AWS Athena, AWS Aurora Serverless, and Azure Cosmos DB immediately came to mind. We believed that GCP would have a comparable service, yet we could not find one. Even after consulting the GCP cloud service comparison documentation we were still unable to find any serverless relational database offering. For these reasons we chose the path of least resistance and opted to use a micro instance of Cloud SQL for MySQL.

#NoSQL Databases #Databases #Graph Databases 9 social mentions

11

AWS Lambda

With our basic application running on GCP for a couple months we have been pleased with the performance and stability of the architecture. Our Cloud Run scaling settings were intentionally set low to meet application expectations as well as to avoid potential bill shock from an autoscaling fiasco. Like AWS App Runner and AWS Lambda we faced cold start delays when scaling up from zero. We could’ve tried to architect around this with something like an automated trigger or always-running instances. Although, the cold start was not a problem for our use-case. We also felt that provisioning always-running instances defeats the purpose of a serverless service. Can a service be considered “serverless” if it can’t scale down to zero so that you’re not paying for idle compute? We said no.

#Cloud Computing #Cloud Hosting #Backend As A Service 245 social mentions

12

Amazon CloudFront

We found that GCP costs were comparable to AWS when the services were matched one-to-one. However, because the AWS CDN service CloudFront is a standalone product a simpler, cheaper, alternative architecture is possible on AWS. The GCP CDN service Cloud CDN requires usage in parallel with their Cloud Load Balancer service, which has a minimum operating cost of ~$18/month, even with no traffic. Finally, our Cloud SQL instance bills hourly as well costing us about ~$9/month. This combined ~$27 doesn’t seem like a lot, yet is drastic when comparing low traffic serverless applications that would cost pennies to host on another cloud provider.

#CDN #Cloud Computing #Content Distribution 67 social mentions

13

Amazon Athena

When debating the database solution for our application we were really seeking for a scalable serverless database that wouldn’t bill us for idle time. Options like AWS Athena, AWS Aurora Serverless, and Azure Cosmos DB immediately came to mind. We believed that GCP would have a comparable service, yet we could not find one. Even after consulting the GCP cloud service comparison documentation we were still unable to find any serverless relational database offering. For these reasons we chose the path of least resistance and opted to use a micro instance of Cloud SQL for MySQL.

#Data Analysis #ETL #Business Intelligence 20 social mentions