I don't know much about web development and cloud computing. From what I've read when using Cloud functions as the webhook service for dialogflow, you are limited to write code in just 1 source file. I would like to create a real complex dialogflow agent, so It would be handy to have an organized code structure to make the development easier.
I've recently discovered Cloud run which seems like it can also handle webhook requests and makes it possible to develop a complex code structure.
I don't want to use Cloud Run just because it is inconvenient to write everything in one file, but on the other hand it would be strange to have a cloud function with a single file with thousands of lines of code.
Is it possible to have multiple files in a single cloud function?
Is cloud run suitable for my problem? (create a complex dialogflow agent)
Is it possible to have multiple files in a single cloud function?
Yes. When you deploy to Google Cloud Functions you create a bundle with all your source files or have it pull from a source repository.
But Dialogflow only allows index.js and package.json in the Built-In Editor
For simplicity, the built-in code editor only allows you to edit those two files. But the built-in editor is mostly just meant for basic testing. If you're doing serious coding, you probably already have an environment you prefer to use to code and deploy that code.
Is Cloud Run suitable?
Certainly. The biggest thing Cloud Run will get you is complete control over your runtime environment, since you're specifying the details of that environment in addition to the code.
The biggest downside, however, is that you also have to determine details of that environment. Cloud Funcitons provide an HTTPS server without you having to worry about those details, as long as the rest of the environment is suitable.
What other options do I have?
Anywhere you want! Dialogflow only requires that your webhook
Be at a public address (ie - one that Google can resolve and reach)
Runs an HTTPS server at that address with a non-self-signed certificate
During testing, it is common to run it on your own machine via a tunnel such as ngrok, but this isn't a good idea in production. If you're already familiar with running an HTTPS server in another environment, and you wish to continue using that environment, you should be fine.
Related
I'm presently looking into GCP's Deployment Manager to deploy new projects, VMs and Cloud Storage buckets.
We need a web front end that authenticated users can connect to in order to deploy the required infrastructure, though I'm not sure what Dev Ops tools are recommended to work with this system. We have an instance of Jenkins and Octopus Deploy, though I see on Google's Configuration Management page (https://cloud.google.com/solutions/configuration-management) they suggest other tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Saltstack.
I'm supposing that through one of these I can update something simple like a name variable in the config.yaml file and deploy a project.
Could I also ensure a chosen name for a project, VM or Cloud Storage bucket fits with a specific naming convention with one of these systems?
Which system do others use and why?
I use Deployment Manager, as all 3rd party tools are reliant upon the presence of GCP APIs, as well as trusting that those APIs are in line with the actual functionality of the underlying GCP tech.
GCP is decidedly behind the curve on API development, which means that even if you wanted to use TF or whatever, at some point you're going to be stuck inside the SDK, anyway. So that's why I went with Deployment Manager, as much as I wanted to have my whole infra/app deployment use other tools that I was more comfortable with.
To specifically answer your question about validating naming schema, what you would probably want to do is write a wrapper script that uses the gcloud deployment-manager subcommand. Do your validation in the wrapper script, then run the gcloud deployment-manager stuff.
Word of warning about Deployment Manager: it makes troubleshooting very difficult. Very often it will obscure the error that can help you actually establish the root cause of a problem. I can't tell you how many times somebody in my office has shouted "UGGH! Shut UP with your Error 400!" I hope that Google takes note from my pointed survey feedback and refactors DM to pass the original error through.
Anyway, hope this helps. GCP has come a long way, but they've still got work to do.
I am looking into Cloud Run to host my new app, and I am wondering if it is possible to generate a separate URL for each git branch.
I use Netlify to host my other app. When it is connected to GitHub (or other VCS services), it builds the source code in a branch and deploy it to a URL that is specific to the branch.
Can it be done easily or do I have to write some logic?
Or do you think AWS amplify or some other services are of better fit?
The concept of Cloud Run and URLs is quite simple:
https://<service-name>-<project hash>.<region>.run.app
If your project and region are the same for all the branches, you simply have to deploy a different service for each branch to get a different URL.
That was for Cloud Run. Now, I'm not sure that Netlify is compliant with Cloud Run. I found no documentation on this.
This answer won't be directly useful to you but I think it's relevant and worth mentioning
The open source Knative API (and implementation actually exposes a "tag" feature while splitting the traffic between multiple revisions: https://github.com/knative/docs/blob/master/docs/serving/spec/knative-api-specification-1.0.md#traffictarget
This feature is not currently supported on Cloud Run fully managed, but it will be.
By tagging releases this way, you could define tag: v1 and tag: v2 in your traffic configuration, and you would get new URLs like:
https://v1-SERVICE_NAME...run.app
https://v2-SERVICE_NAME...run.app
that directly go to these specific versions.
And the interesting thing is, these revisions you specified in the traffic: block of the Service object do not have to receive any traffic (you can say traffic percentage: 0) but it would still create a domain name like I showed above to the inactive revisions of your app.
So when Cloud Run fully-managed supports tag fields, you can actually achieve this, although it will be less out-of-the-box experience than Netlify.
I have a software that process some files. What I need is:
start a default image on google cloud (I think docker should be a good solution) using an API or a run command
download files from google storage
process it, run my software using those downloaded files
upload the result to google storage
shut the image down, expecting not to be billed anymore
What I do know is how to create my image hehe. But I can't find any info saying me what google cloud service should I use or even if I could do it like I'm thinking. I think I'm not using the right keywords to find what i need.
I was looking at Kubernetes, but i couldn't figure out how to manipulate those instances to execute a one time processing.
[EDIT]
Explaining better the process I have an app that receive images and send it to Google storage. After that, I need to process that images, apply filters, georeferencing, split image etc. So I want to start a docker image to process it and upload the results to google cloud again.
If you are using any of the runtimes supported by Google Cloud Functions, they are easiest way to do those kind of operations (i.e. fetch something from Google Cloud Storage, perform some actions on those files and upload them again). The Cloud Functions will be triggered by an event of your choice, and after the job, it will die.
Next option in terms of complexity would be to deploy a Google App Engine application in standard environment. It allows you to deploy your own application written in any of the supported languages for this environment. While there is traffic in your application, you will have instances serving, but the number of instances running can go down to 0 when they are not serving, which would mean less cost.
Another option would be Google App Engine in flexible environment. This product allows you to deploy your application in any custom runtime. This option has always at least one instance running, so it would never shut down.
Lastly, you can use Google Compute Engine to "create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure". Otherwise than GAE, this is not that managed by Google, which means that most of the configuration is up to you. In this case, you would need to programmatically indicate your VM to shut down after you have finished your operations.
Based on your edit where you stated that you already have an app that is inserting images into Google Cloud Storage, your easiest option would be to use Cloud Functions that are triggered by additions, changes, or deletions to objects in Cloud Storage buckets.
You can follow the Cloud Functions tutorial for Cloud Storage to get an idea of the generic process and then implement your own code that handles your specific tasks. There are other tutorials like the Imagemagick tutorial for Cloud Functions that might also be relevant to the type of processing you intend to do.
Cloud Functions is probably your lightest weight approach. You could of course do more full scale applications, but that is likely overkill, more expensive, and more complex. You can write your processing code in Node.js, Python, or Go.
I am currently looking for a solution to run arbitrary scripts on a cloud instance (aws, digitalocean, rackspace, I'm not picky). I am not doing something shady I simply want to use it for performance testing and need reproducible results (deploy a service, set specific testdata, run the performance tests, kill everything, repeat if necessary).
Of course I can use the API of these providers and build a custom solution, but I'm wondering if there is a framework or a bunch of tools that will help me with that.
What I need is:
- Only using an instance for the runtime of the script
- possibility to store data outside of the instance for result analysis
There are a lot of tools to automate setting up cloud instances but they all seem targeted for deployment purposes. What I need is a cloud script runner.
From your description is sounds like you might be looking for something like AWS's new(ish) Lambda service.
This allows you define scripts and triggers to run them in he clued without the overhead of spinning up and having to manage cloud compute 'servers'.
More info:
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
One thing to be careful of when using the cloud for performance testing - you have no teal control over the actual HW that your code will run on and different runs may run on different HW. This is true even for server or instance based cloud testing.
Here's the idea: you commit your code to a repository and call a web service (or enter the request through a web app) to have it compiled. The results are then pushed up to a FTP server, S3 bucket, etc. Is there anything like this out there on the public internet?
TFS has a build queuing feature, but I'm thinking more along the lines of a internet (not intranet) web service. And if it can pull from known source control interfaces (Subversion, CVS, etc.) then the caller needs to pass very little besides selecting a compiler and specific compilation options.
My reasoning is more along the lines of removing a lot of software installation and configuration hassles, especially when working between different languages/platforms/frameworks/projects
See Is there build farm for checking open source apps against different OS'es? for related information.