GCP Cloud Developer Certification - 01. GCP Overview

Intro

The Cloud Developer exam tests your knowledge of five subject areas:

• Designing highly scalable, available, and reliable cloud-native apps
• Building and testing apps
• Deploying apps
• Integrating GCP services
• Managing app performance monitoring

Requires familiarity with:

• Compute
  • VMs
  • Container clusters
• Network
  • VPC
• Storage
  • Cloud Storage
  • NoSQL (Cloud Bigtable)
  • Relational databases (Cloud SQL)
  • Data warehouses (BigQuery)

Basics

For most applications you need 3 three core elements:

• Compute
• Storage
• Networking

If you have on-premises app, on your own server, you can do a "lift & shift migration". Which means taking your app to a Virtual Machine.

Compute Engine = Iaas

App Engine = PaaS

• App Engine vs. Compute Engine
  • In most cases, using App Engine is a better solution than using virtual machines
  • If you have an application that's not a web or mobile app, then you can't use App Engine, so you'll have to use a VM.

Cloud Run: lets you runa container using a single command.

Google Kubernetes Engine: container orchestrator (useful for apps with multiple containers)

Serverless

• App Engine - apps
• Cloud Functions - containers
• Cloud Run - functions

Cloud Function is event-driven

Storage

Cloud Storage = just like S3 buckets, non-hierarchical.

Storage classes:

• Standard
  • Frequently accessed files
  • $$$$
• Nearline
  • Files accessed about once a month or less
  • $$$
• Coldline
  • Files accessed at most once every three months
  • $$
• Archive
  • Files expected to access less than once a year.
  • $

Cloud Filestore = allows hirarchical file structure.

Filestore lets you create NFS-compatible file shares that can be mounted on your Virtual Machines or Containers.

Databases

RDBMS

Cloud SQL is a fully managed service for each of these RDB:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server

NoSQL databases

• Bigtable
  • Run large analytical workloads
• Firestore
  • Build client-side mobile and web applications
• Firebase Realtime Database
  • Sync data between users in real time
• Memorystore
  • Speed up applications by caching frequently requested data

Cloud Spanner

Relational database and massively scalable.

💲💲💲💲💲

if your application is written specifically for a particular database, such as SQL Server, then Cloud SQL would be a better choice, unless you can rewrite it to work with Cloud Spanner.

BigQuery

If you need a Data Warehouse

BigQuery is good for aggregating data from various sources and then do SQL Queries.

Good for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) and business intelligence reporting.

Network

VPC is very similar to an on premises network.

Each VM in a VPC can communicate to each other. You can also split VPCs into subnets and refine routes.

By default, outbound traffic to the internet is allowed. To allow inbound traffic you must define an external IP to a VM.

It's possible to connect one VPC to another one by using VPC Network Peering.

Connecting a VPC to an on-premises network:

• Cloud VPN
• Cloud Interconnect
• Peering

Using GCP Console

Ways to interact with GCP:

• Web interface (aka Console)
• SDK (gcloud, gsutil, bq, kubectl)
• Google Cloud Shell

Zones

A zone is essentially an independent part of a data center and has its own:

• power
• cooling
• network
• security infrastructure

A region has around 3 zones.

Creating a VM

Nothing really new.

Just note that:

Spot VMs are the latest version of Preemptible VMs.

Using the CLI

# create a VM
gcloud compute instances create \
  instance-name \
  --zone=us-central1-a


# deploy an app using App Engine
#
# see instructions here:
# https://github.com/cloudacademy/gcp-overview#using-the-cli
#
# clone a demo app
git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/python-docs-samples

# go to the directory with the app
cd python-docs-samples/appengine/standard_python3/hello_world

# deploy it to app engine
gcloud app deploy

Surprisingly, to disable the app you need to go to the App Engine through the web console.

Other Services Overview

• Migrate for Compute Engine
  • Move your VMs from other Cloud Providers (or physical machines) to the Google's Compute Engine
• Migrate for Anthos
  • Move from virtual machines to containers. Convert a VM into a container.
• Transfer Appliance
  • Transfers huge amount of data.
• Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory
• Cloud Identity
• AI & Machine Learning
  • Sight
  • Language
  • Conversation
  • Structured Data
  • Cloud AutoML
• Data Analytics
  • Ingest
  • Store
  • Process
  • Visualize
  • Cloud Composer
  • Data Fusion (similar to Cloud Composer, but it's graphical/no-code)
• Internet of Things
  • IoT Core
• DevOps
  • Cloud Build
• Cloud CDN
  • Cloud Load Balancer
  • Cloud Armor
  • Cloud IAM
  • Cloud Key Management

Designing a Solution

Website

If you only need to set up a static website (that is, one that doesn’t have any server-side code), then believe it or not, you don’t even need to use any sort of compute service. You can just upload your website to Cloud Storage and point the DNS record for your website to it. You don’t even need to use Google’s Cloud DNS service to make this work. If your website domain is already registered with another domain registrar, then you can just update your website’s DNS record there.

More complex webapp

Management Services

• Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver)
  • Cloud Monitoring
  • Cloud Logging
  • Error Reporting
  • Cloud Trace
  • Cloud Debugger
  • Cloud Profiler

Security Command Center

Cloud Deployment Manager:

Used when you have a resource (such as a VM) and want to deploy newly identical resources.