I want to access GCP bucket data on windows 10 as file system.
GCP provide FUSE for mac and Linux, Is there any way to mount GCP bucket with Windows.
Accordingly to the documentation Cloud Storage FUSE:
Cloud Storage FUSE is an open source FUSE adapter that allows you to mount Cloud Storage buckets as file systems on Linux or macOS systems.
As a result, there is no easy way of using it on the Windows systems.
There are a few possible ways to solve it:
Rclone
Rclone is a command line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces. Over 40 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, as well as standard transfer protocols.
Install Rclone and WinFsp. Remember to add Rclone location to your PATH.
Follow the instructions to set up your remote GCP bucket. If your GCP bucket use Uniform bucket-level access, remember to set the --gcs-bucket-policy-only option to true when configuring Rclone remote drive.
Mount the remote GCP bucket as a local disk
rclone mount remote:path/to/files X:
where X: is an unused drive letter.
GcsFuse-Win:
GcsFuse-Win is a distributed FUSE based file system backed by Google cloud storage service. It is the first open source native version of gcs fuse on windows.It allows you to mount the buckets/folders in the storage account as a the local folder/driver on Windows system. It support the cluster mode. you can mount the blob container (or part of it) across multiple windows nodes.
CloudBerry Drive (proprietary software):
Mount cloud storage as a network drive to your Windows workstation or Windows Server
Mount bucket with FUSE into a Linux instance and share it via network Samba/NFS.
Another three tools that may be usefull here are:
NetDrive - this is a paid software (~50USD per lifetime licence). You can try it out for free however (7 days trial) and it will actually allow you to mount whatever GCP storage you have as a filesystem in Windows.
Mountain Duck - has very similar abilities and also allows mounting GCP storage in Windows - it's sligtly cheaper ~40USD for one user but it's valid for a specific major version.
CyberDuck - is the free (or libre as the official page states) version of the Mountain Duck - it doesn't allow mounting resources as a filesystem but it still let you access any cloud storage via it's interface simple & intuitive).
Related
I'm a hobby photographer and take load of raw photos. I was wondering if there is a possibility to get rid of my external drive and use GCP Cloud Storage instead. I would require to access, read, write files directly from Adobe LightRoom.
Can I have a drive displayed on My PC in windows 10, just like I can see C:,D: i'd like to see gs: drive there.
Thanks for the help!
If you want use GCP's storage service as a network drive, That's what Cloud filestore does.
This is not Google Cloud storage, But this can be another option.
You can mount Cloud Filestore persistent disk to your windows 10 filesystem.
This allows you to use GCP persistent disk as usual like C:,D: drives.
But it is liitle bit expensive, So you need to compare with other options.
Here is GCP price calculator.
There is a GcsFuse-Win version which is backed by Google Cloud Storage Service. This is the first gcs fuse on Windows allows you to mount the buckets/folders in the storage account as a the local folder/driver on Windows system. To install the service on the Windows you must need a GCP account. I suggest you to read out the limitations before deploy in the production.
According to the docs:
Cloud Shell provisions 5 GB of free persistent disk storage mounted as your $HOME directory on the virtual machine instance.
I would need more (paid) storage though that I can access from the Cloud Shell environment and that is persistent across my sessions. It's mostly used to store local clones of git repositories and images. I would be the only one to access these files.
It seems that the 5 GB storage is a hard limit, so it won't expand dynamically and bill me for the exceeding amount. It is possible to use Boost Mode, but that does not affect the storage size. And I also can't provision more storage with a custom Cloud Shell environment. I couldn't figure out if I can mount another GCE persistent disk to my $HOME. I was considering gcs-fuse as suggested in this answer but I'm not sure if it is suitable for git repos.
Is there any way to have more storage available in Cloud Shell?
Google Cloud Shell is a container that runs on a hidden Compute Engine instance managed by Google. You can download, modify and redeploy this container to Cloud Shell or to your own container running in the cloud or on your desktop.
The base image of the container is available at gcr.io/cloudshell-images/cloudshell:latest, per this page.
For your use case, I would use Compute Engine with Container OS and run the Cloud Shell container within COS. You can scale the CPUs, memory, and storage to fit your requirements.
You can also set up a Compute Engine instance, install the CLIs, SDKs, and tools and have a more powerful system.
Notes for future readers based upon the first answer:
Filestore is a great product, but pay attention to costs. The minimum deployment is 1 TB at $200+ per month. You will need to mount the NFS share each time Cloud Shell restarts - this can be put into login scripts. Note: I am not sure if you can actually mount an NFS share from Filestore in Cloud Shell. I have never tested this.
You will have the same remount problem with FUSE, plus you will have bandwidth costs to access Cloud Storage.
Cloud Shell is a great product that is well implemented, but when you need to exceed its capabilities it is better to deploy a small/medium size GCE instance. this enables persistent, snapshots, etc.
There is another way to have more disk space in the cloud shell. It's to create a cloud storage bucket and map the cloud storage bucket as a folder. This way you can store larger files in the cloud storage bucket and it doesn't require any compute instance.
Go to cloud storage and create a new storage bucket
Copy the storage bucket's name, eg. my_storage_bucket
Go to cloud shell and create a folder in your home folder
mkdir ~/my_bucket_folder
Mount the storage bucket to this folder
gcsfuse my_storage_bucket ~/my_bucket_folder
Change directory to your my_bucket_folder
cd ~/my_bucket_folder
Voila! you have unlimited space!
To unmount please run the following
fusermount -u ~/my_bucket_folder
I'm using gcsfuse and works fine. You don't have to remount every time if you put the mount command in .customize_environment (run on boot up).
#!/bin/sh
#.customize_environmnet run in background as root, wait for your user to initialize
sleep 20
sudo -u [USER] gcsfuse -o nonempty -file-mode=777 -dir-mode=777 --uid=1000 --debug_gcs [BUCKET_NAME] /home/[USER]/[FOLDER_NAME]
You can read more at Unlimited persistent disk in google cloud shell
There is no way of adding more storage to the Cloud Shell. You can create a VM and install the Cloud SDK and have as much storage as you'd like but it is not currently possible to add storage space to the Cloud Shell.
Depending on how you plan on using the saved repos, Cloud Storage may be ideal as it has a storage category just perfect archiving.
Filestore will be your best option as it is great for file systems and it is scalable. It fits your needs as you have described.
You can use Cloud Storage with FUSE. Keep in mind that this method, although great, depends on how it will be used as costs are based on storage category.
You can see a brief comparison of the Storage solutions the Cloud Platform has to offer here.
I am doing video services and uploading videos to Google Cloud Storage.
You saw that it was not correct to mount GCS on its own WAS(web Service).
My Question
Is it wrong to mount its own WAS and GCS?
(Do you recommend to mount your own WAS and GCS?)
How do I mount my own WAS and GCS?
If not, how should I use GCS?
Are there related documents?
If you want to serve videos that are stored in GCS, a common approach would be to use URL links to publicly accessible buckets and objects in them. You can have a look at an article about accessing public data here. Before that you would need to make your data public.
You can mount GCS buckets as file systems on your own Linux system with the help of the open source Cloud Storage FUSE adapter. You can check out the GCP documentation here and if you wish to learn more about GCS FUSE you can check out the official GitHub repository where it is also explained how to install and mount it.
If your wish to upload and download Cloud Storage objects using standard file system semantics in your application, Cloud Storage FUSE is a suitable choice.
I have 10 Windows VMs where I want to have PD with both read-write in all the VM's. But I came to know that we cannot mount a disk to multiple VMs with read-write. SO I am looking for option where I can access a disk from any of those VMs. For Linux we can use GCSFuse to mount the Cloud storage as a disk, Do we have any option for windows where we can mount a single disk/Cloud Storage buckets to Multiple Windows VMs.
If you want it specifically to be a GCP Disk, your best option will be setting up an additional Windows instance, and set up a shared SMB disk with the other instances.
Another option, if you don't want to get too messy, best option would be using the Filestore service ( https://cloud.google.com/filestore/ ) , which is an NFS as a service, provided you have an NFS client for your Windows version
I believe you could use Google Cloud Storage buckets, which could be an intermediate transfer point between your instances, regardless of OS.
Upload your files from your workstation to a Cloud Storage bucket. Then, download those files from the bucket to your instances. When you need to transfer files in the other direction, reverse the process. Upload the files from your instance and then download those files to your workstation.
To achieve this follow these steps:
Create a new Cloud Storage bucket or identify an existing
bucket that you want to use to transfer files.
Upload files to
the bucket
Connect to your instance using RDP
upload/download files from the bucket.
However, there are other options like using file servers on Compute engine or following options:
Cloud Storage
Compute Engine persistent disks
Single Node File Server
Elastifile
Quobyte
Avere vFXT
These options have their advantages and disadvantages, for more details for the links attached to each of these options.
I have a service hosted on Amazon Web Services. There I have multiple EC2 instances running with the exact same setup and data, managed by an Elastic Load Balancer and scaling groups.
Those instances are web servers running web applications based on PHP. So currently there are the very same files etc. placed on every instance. But when the ELB / scaling group launches a new instance based on load rules etc., the files might not be up-to-date.
Additionally, I'd rather like to use a shared file system for PHP sessions etc. than sticky sessions.
So, my question is, for those reasons and maybe more coming up in the future, I would like to have a shared file system entity which I can attach to my EC2 instances.
What way would you suggest to resolve this? Are there any solutions offered by AWS directly so I can rely on their services rather than doing it on my on with a DRBD and so on? What is the easiest approach? DRBD, NFS, ...? Is S3 also feasible for those intends?
Thanks in advance.
As mentioned in a comment, AWS has announced EFS (http://aws.amazon.com/efs/) a shared network file system. It is currently in very limited preview, but based on previous AWS services I would hope to see it generally available in the next few months.
In the meantime there are a couple of third party shared file system solutions for AWS such as SoftNAS https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00PJ9FGVU/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-3&qid=1432203627313
S3 is possible but not always ideal, the main blocker being it does not natively support any filesystem protocols, instead all interactions need to be via an AWS API or via http calls. Additionally when looking at using it for session stores the 'eventually consistent' model will likely cause issues.
That being said - if all you need is updated resources, you could create a simple script to run either as a cron or on startup that downloads the files from s3.
Finally in the case of static resources like css/images don't store them on your webserver in the first place - there are plenty of articles covering the benefit of storing and accessing static web resources directly from s3 while keeping the dynamic stuff on your server.
From what we can tell at this point, EFS is expected to provide basic NFS file sharing on SSD-backed storage. Once available, it will be a v1.0 proprietary file system. There is no encryption and its AWS-only. The data is completely under AWS control.
SoftNAS is a mature, proven advanced ZFS-based NAS Filer that is full-featured, including encrypted EBS and S3 storage, storage snapshots for data protection, writable clones for DevOps and QA testing, RAM and SSD caching for maximum IOPS and throughput, deduplication and compression, cross-zone HA and a 100% up-time SLA. It supports NFS with LDAP and Active Directory authentication, CIFS/SMB with AD users/groups, iSCSI multi-pathing, FTP and (soon) AFP. SoftNAS instances and all storage is completely under your control and you have complete control of the EBS and S3 encryption and keys (you can use EBS encryption or any Linux compatible encryption and key management approach you prefer or require).
The ZFS filesystem is a proven filesystem that is trusted by thousands of enterprises globally. Customers are running more than 600 million files in production on SoftNAS today - ZFS is capable of scaling into the billions.
SoftNAS is cross-platform, and runs on cloud platforms other than AWS, including Azure, CenturyLink Cloud, Faction cloud, VMware vSPhere/ESXi, VMware vCloud Air and Hyper-V, so your data is not limited or locked into AWS. More platforms are planned. It provides cross-platform replication, making it easy to migrate data between any supported public cloud, private cloud, or premise-based data center.
SoftNAS is backed by industry-leading technical support from cloud storage specialists (it's all we do), something you may need or want.
Those are some of the more noteworthy differences between EFS and SoftNAS. For a more detailed comparison chart:
https://www.softnas.com/wp/nas-storage/softnas-cloud-aws-nfs-cifs/how-does-it-compare/
If you are willing to roll your own HA NFS cluster, and be responsible for its care, feeding and support, then you can use Linux and DRBD/corosync or any number of other Linux clustering approaches. You will have to support it yourself and be responsible for whatever happens.
There's also GlusterFS. It does well up to 250,000 files (in our testing) and has been observed to suffer from an IOPS brownout when approaching 1 million files, and IOPS blackouts above 1 million files (according to customers who have used it). For smaller deployments it reportedly works reasonably well.
Hope that helps.
CTO - SoftNAS
For keeping your webserver sessions in sync you can easily switch to Redis or Memcached as your session handler. This is a simple setting in the PHP.ini and they can all access the same Redis or Memcached server to do sessions. You can use Amazon's Elasticache which will manage the Redis or Memcache instance for you.
http://phpave.com/redis-as-a-php-session-handler/ <- explains how to setup Redis with PHP pretty easily
For keeping your files in sync is a little bit more complicated.
How to I push new code changes to all my webservers?
You could use Git. When you deploy you can setup multiple servers and it will push your branch (master) to the multiple servers. So every new build goes out to all webserver.
What about new machines that launch?
I would setup new machines to run a rsync script from a trusted source, your master web server. That way they sync their web folders with the master when they boot and would be identical even if the AMI had old web files in it.
What about files that change and need to be live updated?
Store any user uploaded files in S3. So if user uploads a document on Server 1 then the file is stored in s3 and location is stored in a database. Then if a different user is on server 2 he can see the same file and access it as if it was on server 2. The file would be retrieved from s3 and served to the client.
GlusterFS is also an open source distributed file system used by many to create shared storage across EC2 instances
Until Amazon EFS hits production the best approach in my opinion is to build a storage backend exporting NFS from EC2 instances, maybe using Pacemaker/Corosync to achieve HA.
You could create an EBS volume that stores the files and instruct Pacemaker to umount/dettach and then attach/mount the EBS volume to the healthy NFS cluster node.
Hi we currently use a product called SoftNAS in our AWS environment. It allows us to chooses between both EBS and S3 backed storage. It has built in replication as well as a high availability option. May be something you can check out. I believe they offer a free trial you can try out on AWS
We are using ObjectiveFS and it is working well for us. It uses S3 for storage and is straight forward to set up.
They've also written a doc on how to share files between EC2 instances.
http://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-share-files-between-ec2-instances