is Google Cloud Platform capable of providing these things? - google-cloud-platform

I have a system made up of the following that I'd like to host on Google Cloud Platform:
web service (apache cxf)
web server (apache tomcat)
database (mysql)
hosted web pages
I'd like to be able to install/set up Tomcat and MySql myself. I do not want to use someone's canned, prepackaged components.
If this has built in tools to allow load testing that would be a great nice to have but its not required.
What is required is that it essentially runs itself and requires little hands on intervention from me on a day to day basis.

Yes the GCP can do all of that.
Just set up a virtual machine inside the compute engine and it will be very easy to maintain and even scale your applications.
My company is doing just that right now.

Yes you can use the Google Compute Engine , it's Infrastructure as a Service just like Amazon EC2 or other servers.
Refer https://cloud.google.com/compute/

Related

Can SaaS and PaaS be used together?

PaaS is used for creating custom applications using programming which will later be deployed onto the provider's cloud.
SaaS, on the other hand, the consumer uses the provider's applications running on the provider's infrastructure. Also, SaaS uses PaaS
Can the provider and the consumer be the same thing?
If a certain organisation uses SaaS can it go back to PaaS and build an application that it needs and then use it on SaaS?
SaaS - You build an application (e.g. App_A), deploy it somewhere (cloud) and different customers use the application over the web or without having to host it themselves.
When you build the application, (e.g. App_A) and have to deploy it to a cloud provider, you have 2 options
a) Take care of 'virtually' building the hardware - you select disk size, select an OS, memory size, install all the necessary software and then you deploy your application on it. In this case, you are using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It's like building a computer first and then installing (deploying) your App.
b) Second option is that the cloud provider handles all of the earlier mentioned components and you just deploy your code. It's like someone gives you an already built computer and you just install your code (your application). This is Platform as a service (PaaS)
At the end of the day, you can run a business (a SaaS) on a PaaS e.g. Khan Academy & SnapChat both run on Google App Engine. In these examples, Khan Academy and SnapChat are both SaaS running on Google App Engine which is a PaaS
Can the provider and the consumer be the same thing?
I think you are confusing these two terms. The provider is the CSP (cloud service provider) and consumer is the entity/users actually accessing the software/infrastructure.
The whole point of PAAS is that it provides a framework for developers to build customized applications, as well as simple cost-effective deployment of apps. If you wanted to access your application through the cloud similar to how SAAS works then that is entirely possible but would still require you pay the CSP for VM space to run your applications

How to connect a local service being developed to a hosted service mesh?

I currently have a hosted (GCP) microservice environment that is under development. When working on a service I currently run the environment locally. I run all the services that the service I am working on needs to communicate to.
This provides a bad developer experience because:
I have to spin up every service; there can be a lot
running so many services can use a lot of my system resources
If any of those services need a DB, I have to set that up too
I'm looking for a soution to this. Idealy, I will run just the single service locally and connect to the rest of the services in the hosted environment.
Do any of the popular service meshes offer this as an option? I'm looking at Istio and Kuma primarily. Are there any alternatives solutions that come to mind?
For remote development/debugging I would suggest to have a look at Telepresence.
https://www.telepresence.io/
It is even recommended by Kubernetes docs:
Using telepresence allows you to use custom tools, such as a debugger and IDE, for a local service and provides the service full access to ConfigMap, secrets, and the services running on the remote cluster.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/local-debugging/
Istio on the other hand enables you to do shadow deployment and canary or blue/green deployment. You can e.g. run a service and send certain user (based on the header) to a new version. You can mirror traffic to a service or shift traffic from 0 to 100 % step by step. I'd say it's more for testing your new service under load or gradually releasing a new version.

Is it hard to deploy a cloud server?

Sorry I'm new to web server. I want to deploy a cloud server for user data:
User can login using web, with verification code sent to user's phone.
User can manipulate his data (add/modify/remove) when login.
Android/iPhone client can manipulate user data when login.
Server should have a database for storage, SQLLite or others.
It would be good to use Amazon/Ali-cloud cloud service, provided it can speed up my deployment. I'm not sure if I need run into blobs such as H5, PHP/JSP, node.js or others. Can you provide a guide for me, web link or book?
And, what's the most popular programming interface between Android/IOS app and cloud server? http post/get or other wrapper ?
Surely you can speed up your deployment using Amazon Web Services. This is my recommendation:
For Webserver,
Amazon EC2: Launch an instance where you can install Apache/Nginx
here. You will need a RDS instance running parallel with your server
which will lower your need on server CPU/Mem, but will cost also.
For Database, you can have many approach ways here:
Amazon RDS: Launch an instance where you host your Database
(mysql/...). This one will provide you with Database Name, Hostname,
Users, ... which you can use to connect with your webserver in EC2.
Your Android/IOS application can use RDS information for the database
connection.
Amazon DynamoDB: Fast, Flexible for NoSQL (wonder if you want to use
traditional database or NoSQL?): https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/
For Mobile/Website access control,
AWS Cognito: Great for user-accounts, designed for real-time data
model: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/?nc1=f_ls
For serverless if you want to GET/PUT API on your webserver for
easier,
AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/?nc1=f_ls
Taking into account that you are just starting with your application, I would suggest going with serverless architecture with AWS Lambda running your business logic.
Key benefits:
No server management = spend time on building your application vs on maintaining infrastructure
Flexible scaling = scale based on what you really need
Pay for value = don't pay for resources that you don't need
Automated high availability = serverless provides built-in availability and fault tolerance
To learn more on serverless, you may want to check Building Serverless Web Applications - 2017 AWS Online Tech Talks.
Now when it comes to going deep, I would suggest checking online trainings available from acloud.guru, cloud academy, udemy or linuxacademy for serverless and also for the development language you want to use (Node.js is often used for such scenarios).

Website with Google cloud compute

Total NOOB question. I want to setup a website on google cloud compute platform with:
static IP/IP range(external API requirement)
simple front-end
average to low traffic with a maximum of few thousand requests a
day.
separate database instance.
I went through the documentation of services offered Google and Amazon. Not fully sure what is the best way to go about it. Understand that there is no right answer.
A viable solution is:
Spawn up an n1-standard instance on GCP (I prefer to use Debian)
Get a static IP, which is free if you don't let it dangling.
Depending upon your DB type choose Cloud SQL for structured data or Cloud Datastore for unstructured data
Nginx is a viable option for web-server. Get started here
Rest is upon you. What kind of stack are you using to build your app? How are you gonna deploy your code to instance? You might later wanna use Docker and k8s to get flexibility between cloud providers and scaling needs.
The easiest way of creating the website you want would be Google App Engine with the Datastore as DB. However it doesn't support static IP's, this is due to a design choice. Is this absolutely mandatory?
App Engine does not currently provide a way to map static IP addresses
to an application. In order to optimize the network path between an
end user and an App Engine application, end users on different ISPs or
geographic locations might use different IP addresses to access the
same App Engine application. DNS might return different IP addresses
to access App Engine over time or from different network locations.

Drupal with Amazon Web Services?

I'm not sure if this is the write place to ask, but this is the only site I know where I get my questions answered... anyways
I wanted to install drupal but where should I host it? Can amazon web service host this such application? Do I need to go somewhere else and host it? I do have an account with inmotionhosting, but I was thinking if Amazon does the job, why not just use it? Any thoughts and opinions?
You can install Drupal on AWS EC2 if you have sys admin experience. Otherwise you will need to use a managed platform, like Cloudways, for that. Configuring web server like Apache and Nginx, cache like Varnish and Memcached and other features on AWS is little difficult. Many managed servers have those features available in their platform so you don't have to configure anything or go through long process of installing application on AWS.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) will host Drupal no problem.
The service you're looking for is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It's pretty much equivalent to a private server with which you can do almost whatever you want (Web hosting included). The downside is that you have to do all the setup yourself.
If you don't know how to install Apache or configure your own Linux machine, you'd probably be better off with managed hosting where they'll set everything up for you.
You can also just use AWS Cloudformation to set up your drupal environment. It's a service that is part of AWS that will set up your stack for you. you may still need to know how to handle your config files but at least you do not have to go into installing the DB , Apache etc all manually.
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
Bitnami provides a free (Apache-licensed) pre-built Drupal image for AWS that you launch easily. It is great for quickly testing something but if you choose the right instance for your expected load, also for production (disclaimer: I am a cofounder of Bitnami, though as I mentioned the image is open source)
Drupal can be deployed and hosted automatically on Jelastic PaaS. You won't need to configure it from scratch. And if you wish to make some custom settings while installation, you can also easily install it manually. Both variants are described in the guide.
As a result, you'll get automatic scaling, pay-per-use pricing, management via intuitive UI, a wide choice of local service providers from different countries and other options to run your Drupal effectively.