Planning and Configuring a GCP Solution

Compute

3 main approaches to compute:

Options available for specific use cases

Machine Types

3 main families:

Instances are billed based on uptime.

2 other types:

By combining custom machine types with preemptible VMs, you can really optimize costs for fault-tolerant jobs.

Important discounts:

Ways to save money on GCP

Price Calculator

GCP exposes an API for querying pricing data and offers a simplified web page.

Storage

Offerings for simple storage:

SQL-like:

Choosing the right storage option

Issues to keep in mind:

  1. What's the data model?
    • Example: Relational vs. NoSQL
    • Cloud SQL: if you need a robust managed relational database service.
    • Cloud Spanner if you need global scalability and can tolerate a bit more latency (and high costs)
    • Memorystore: redis service for ultra-low latency in-memory storage
    • Cloud Firestore: document based
    • Bigtable: wide column storage offering
  2. What are my access patterns?
    • read-heavy vs. write-heavy vs. balanced
    • What sort of queries to support?
    • Strict SLA requiring very fast data retrieval? (Cloud SQL)
    • Access from many different regions? (Cloud Spanner)
    • Do we need cache?
  3. What is the expected amount of data now and into the foreseeable future?
  4. Are there any external constraints around cost, compliance, data location, etc.?

Network

Main services:

Network Peering Services

Peering is the process of connecting two separate networks so they can exchange traffic.

Network Security Solutions

A VPC is an isolated subset of a larger network with firewalls to block unauthorized access. Generally it is the key unit of measure for defining your application's network resources.

A GCP VPC can span multiple geographic regions. Instances in US and in Brazil can talk to each other without accessing the public internet.

Niche networking services:

About Traffic Director:

A network traffic management tool specifically for service mesh architectures.

A service mesh is an additional software infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication.

GCP Load Balancing

There are 6 types, each designed for a particular type of traffic workload. Three for global distribution, and three for regional.

3 Global types:

3 Regional types:

Planning and Configuring a GCP Solution - Load Balancer options.png

Cloud DNS

DNS providers let you publish domain names and route traffic to specific servers and infrastructure.

Start by creating managed zones within Cloud DNS: