Google Cloud Compute Services Cheat Sheet

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Google Cloud Compute Services

Google Cloud - Compute Services Options

is a virtual machine (VM) hosted on Google’s infrastructure.
can run the public images for Google provided Linux and Windows Server as well as custom images created or imported from existing systems

availability policy determines how it behaves when there is a maintenance event
- VM instance’s maintenance behavior onHostMaintenance, which determines whether the instance is live migrated MIGRATE (default) or stopped TERMINATE
- Instance’s restart behavior automaticRestart which determines whether the instance automatically restarts (default) if it crashes or gets stopped

Live migration helps keep the VM instances running even when a host system event, such as a software or hardware update, occurs
Preemptible VM is an instance that can be created and run at a much lower price than normal instances, however can be stopped at any time
Shielded VM offers verifiable integrity of the Compute Engine VM instances, to confirm the instances haven’t been compromised by boot- or kernel-level malware or rootkits.

Instance template is a resource used to create VM instances and managed instance groups (MIGs) with identical configuration
Instance group is a collection of virtual machine (VM) instances that can be managed as a single entity.
- Managed instance groups (MIGs)
  - allows app creation with multiple identical VMs.
  - workloads can be made scalable and highly available by taking advantage of automated MIG services, including: autoscaling, autohealing, regional (multiple zone) deployment, and automatic updating
  - supports rolling update feature
  - works with load balancing services to distribute traffic across all of the instances in the group.
- Unmanaged instance groups
  - allows load balance across a fleet of VMs that you manage yourself which may not be identical

Instance template are global, while instance groups are regional.
Machine image stores all the configuration, data, metadata and permissions from one or more disks required to create a VM instance
Sole-tenancy provides dedicated hosting only for the project’s VM and provides added layer of hardware isolation

deletionProtection prevents accidental VM deletion esp. for VMs running critical workloads and need to be protected
provides Sustained Discounts, Committed discounts, free tier etc in pricing

App Engine helps build highly scalable applications on a fully managed serverless platform

Each Cloud project can contain only a single App Engine application
App Engine is regional, which means the infrastructure that runs the apps is located in a specific region, and Google manages it so that it is available redundantly across all of the zones within that region
App Engine application location or region cannot be changed once created

App engine allows traffic management to an application version by migrating or splitting traffic.
- Traffic Splitting (Canary) – distributes a percentage of traffic to versions of the application.
- Traffic Migration – smoothly switches request routing

Support Standard and Flexible environments
- Standard environment
  - Application instances that run in a sandbox, using the runtime environment of a supported language only.
  - Sandbox restricts what the application can do
    - only allows the app to use a limited set of binary libraries
    - app cannot write to disk
    - limits the CPU and memory options available to the application
  - Sandbox does not support
    - SSH debugging
    - Background processes
    - Background threads (limited capability)
    - Using Cloud VPN
- Flexible environment
  - Application instances run within Docker containers on Compute Engine virtual machines (VM).
  - As Flexible environment supports docker it can support custom runtime or source code written in other programming languages.
  - Allows selection of any Compute Engine machine type for instances so that the application has access to more memory and CPU.
min_idle_instances indicates the number of additional instances to be kept running and ready to serve traffic for this version.

Node Pool

GKE
commands
–num-nodes scale cluster –size is deprecated