Book Image

Google Cloud Platform for Architects

By : Vitthal Srinivasan, Loonycorn , Judy Raj
Book Image

Google Cloud Platform for Architects

By: Vitthal Srinivasan, Loonycorn , Judy Raj

Overview of this book

Using a public cloud platform was considered risky a decade ago, and unconventional even just a few years ago. Today, however, use of the public cloud is completely mainstream - the norm, rather than the exception. Several leading technology firms, including Google, have built sophisticated cloud platforms, and are locked in a fierce competition for market share. The main goal of this book is to enable you to get the best out of the GCP, and to use it with confidence and competence. You will learn why cloud architectures take the forms that they do, and this will help you become a skilled high-level cloud architect. You will also learn how individual cloud services are configured and used, so that you are never intimidated at having to build it yourself. You will also learn the right way and the right situation in which to use the important GCP services. By the end of this book, you will be able to make the most out of Google Cloud Platform design.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
13
Logging and Monitoring

Understand the differences between snapshots and images

Persistent disks can be backed up using either images or snapshots; the two services seem similar but differ in some subtle ways, so let's be sure we understand the differences:

  • Snapshots are best for data backups, they are cheaper, and incremental snapshots are possible too.
  • Images are best for infrastructure re-use, such as exporting a VM image for use in a different project or as the basis for a Managed Instance Group.
  • As we just mentioned previously, only images can be used as the basis for an instance template, which in turn is used to create Managed Instance Groups. Snapshots can't be used for this purpose.
  • Images can be shared across projects and assigned versions and organized into families, marked with metadata, such as deprecated and obsolete.
  • A fresh VM can be spun up using either a snapshot or an image...