The Google Compute Engine service lets you create and run virtual machine instances on GCP. Just like any other cloud provider, Google lets you deploy and manage virtual machine instances in a true Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) fashion. Google Compute Engine also supports a variety of operating systems including Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2 and 2016, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, CentOS, CoreOS, and Debian. You can even import a disk image from your on-premises environment. Each instance is part of a project and contains a small persistent root disk and more storage can be added depending on your requirements. A virtual private cloud (VPC) network can also be attached to an instance with an assigned IP address. We will discuss storage and networking requirements more later in this chapter.

Let's look at deploying a virtual machine instance using an machine image. Once the image is deployed, the compute engine automatically starts the instance. The following diagram describes the high-level process of how a machine image can be used to deploy a compute instance. The image archive, which consists of the master boot records and the relevant partitions, is uploaded to cloud storage. You can then create a template/image, persistent disks, and then create a compute instance to boot off these disks:

You can create an instance from an image using the Google Cloud Platform console, the gcloud command-line tool or the API by following these steps:

1. Log in to your Google Cloud Platform console, select a project and click on VM Instances.

2. Click on the...

Preemptible instances are VM instances that can be created at a much lower price than a regular instance. The only difference is that the compute engine can terminate these instances if those resources need to be reclaimed for other tasks. Preemptible instances also have a 24-hour limit after which they are terminated.

If GCP determines that their data center load is increasing, they can, selectively, terminate your pre emptive VM instance, which can cause application disruption. It is very important that premptible instances be used only for applications that are fault-tolerant or batch-processing jobs.

Preemptible instances are created during VM instance creation. Just set the Preemptibility option to On to change the instance to a preemptible...

A compute engine virtual machine instance can live migrate when a host system event occurs such as a software or a hardware update. This feature prevents unnecessary reboots of a virtual machine and can live migrate the virtual machine in the same zone. It is important to remember that live migration does not change the virtual machine configuration, but rather moves it to another host without any interruption.

It is important to remember that instances with GPUs cannot be live migrated. These virtual machines will need to be terminated. The compute engine provides a 60-minute notice before the virtual machine with the GPU is terminated. Preemptible instances cannot be live migrated either.

Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that allows you to quickly deploy your applications. The app engine environment automatically scales your app up or down depending on the load. You can also customize the runtime and the operating system of your app engine using Docker files.

App engine offers two different environments, the flexible environment and the standard environment. Depending on your use case, you can choose to use both environments simultaneously for your application.

The following table summarizes the differences between the two environments:

One of the most interesting and sought-after features of Google cloud platform is its Kubernetes engine. The Google Kubernetes engine provides a way to deploy, manage, and scale your containerized applications. Kubernetes provides an environment that contains multiple compute engine instances that work together as a container cluster. Kubernetes engine gives you all the benefits of running clusters such as load balancing and automatic scaling and upgrades.

In Kubernetes, a container cluster consists of one or more cluster master and multiple machine instances called nodes. These machine instances are compute engine instances that work as a cluster node. All your containers run on top of this container cluster. You can create...

Within a cluster, you can create pools of nodes that are identical to each other. When you create a cluster, the number and type of nodes you specify becomes the default-node-pool. You can add more nodes to this pool or create a different set of node pools that is managed by the same cluster. Creating additional node pools comes in handy when you have a containerized application with a different set of resource requirements.

To create a node pool:

1. Click on the Kubernetes cluster and click on EDIT and scroll to the bottom to find Node Pools:

2. Here you can either change the Size of the current node pool, the default-pool, delete it, or click on Add node pool. This opens up a fresh set of options to add to your additional node pool:

3. Click Save to deploy the second node pool. This deploys two more nodes in the compute engine that are part of the pool and are managed...

Google Cloud Functions is a serverless environment for building and connecting cloud services. Developers and users write simple-purpose functions that are executed in response to an event that may be generated from your cloud instances or infrastructure. When the event being watched is triggered, the cloud function executes in a fully managed environment. This kind of approach saves a lot of time because a developer need not worry about having to deploy the underlying infrastructure that is required to run their code. Cloud functions remove the additional overhead of managing the environment and give a developer a fully managed execution environment that can readily be used.

Cloud functions are written in JavaScript and execute in a Node.js v6.11.5 environment. Because cloud functions execute in a Node.js environment, you can easily build and test the function...

In this chapter, we learned about Google's virtual machine capabilities using the compute engine, which allows you to deploy a rich set of virtual machines with a variety of features. We then looked at the app engine, which provides a PaaS environment that allows you to deploy your application using an SDK. Kubernetes engine is a powerful container orchestration and cluster management feature that allows you to deploy, manage, and scale your containers' workloads. Google Cloud Functions provide a serverless execution environment that lets you deploy your single-purpose functions into the cloud without the need to build, manage, and maintain a deployment environment or infrastructure. Cloud functions can react or be invoked using triggers that are tied to your cloud infrastructure or applications. In the next chapter, we will look into different storage options...