Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a strong contender to the incumbents Amazon Web Services and Azure as the most prominent cloud service provider in the startup and enterprise world. When you think big, when you think about global scale and when you think about state-of-the art technology, the GCP will not let you down. The software and hardware, and the services built on them, come from Google's homegrown research. Both start-ups and enterprises now benefit from the wide array of services provided by GCP.
With GCP, it is easy to perform your business as usual using IaaS, PaaS, and container services backed with strongly supported networking, database offerings, and storage. GCP provides some unique services that are not available with any other provider, especially in managing huge volumes of data, machine learning, and AI.
The book covers a broad range of recipes to give you a taste of the GCP. If you are an architect, you'll find some interesting features of GCP that you can build upon. If you are a developer, you'll get your hands dirty on most of the important services and how to manage them programmatically.
This book aims at IT professionals, engineers, and developers who are looking at implementing Google Cloud in their organizations. Administrators and architects planning to make their organization more efficient using Google Cloud will also find this book useful.
Chapter 1, Compute, contains recipes on the compute services of the GCP, namely Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Google Cloud Functions.
Chapter 2, Storage and Databases, provides some recipes on Google Cloud Storage and some of the database options available (Cloud Spanner, Cloud BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud Datastore).
Chapter 3, Networking, provides a few advanced recipes on connecting two networks and handling traffic to websites.
Chapter 4, Security, discusses how to use some out-of-the-box security tools provided by the GCP and how GCP provides APIs to set up your own security systems.
Chapter 5, Machine Learning and Big Data, contains a few recipes that show the breadth of the big data offerings of GCP and some applied machine learning APIs, which will be directly consumed for our needs.
Chapter 6, Management Tools, shows us some recipes on the Stackdriver suite and the logging system to help us manage our Cloud Platform.
Chapter 7, Best Practices, covers some third-party tools and processes that can be used at the enterprise scale to derive the maximum benefit from the GCP.
The readers should have a Linux VM, which is where the examples can be downloaded to and executed. The Linux VM will act as your development machine. Make sure that your development machine has enough space to handle the number of dependencies that will be installed along with the code. A basic understanding of cloud services and GCP is necessary.
Few recipes have simple configuration of services and others will require changes to source code. Hence, a familiarity with a programming language (Python/Node.js) and basic Linux knowledge will be beneficial.
Due to the rapid evolution of tools and dependencies, there is the possibility of commands and code breaking. Head over to the documentation if you need to modify the commands/code to suit your needs.
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We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/GoogleCloudPlatformCookbook_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In the alpha-mgmt network, open the SSH port 22 to all servers with the network tag alpha-server."
A block of code is set as follows:
#! /bin/bash apt-get update apt-get install -y apache2 cat <<EOF > /var/www/html/index.html <html><body><h1>Hello World</h1> <p>Web server on the alpha and beta networks</p> </body></html> EOF
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
### Hardcoding tokens in a program is never a good idea. This can be used only for learning ###
access_token = ""
access_token_secret = ""
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ sudo echo "1 rt1" >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tablesBold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Choose the Automatic option under Subnet creation mode."
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make you more knowledgeable about the recipe.
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