Book Image

Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

By : Ted Hunter, Steven Porter, Legorie Rajan PS
Book Image

Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

By: Ted Hunter, Steven Porter, Legorie Rajan PS

Overview of this book

GCP is a cloud computing platform with a wide range of products and services that enable you to build and deploy cloud-hosted applications. This Learning Path will guide you in using GCP and designing, deploying, and managing applications on Google Cloud. You will get started by learning how to use App Engine to access Google's scalable hosting and build software that runs on this framework. With the help of Google Compute Engine, you’ll be able to host your workload on virtual machine instances. The later chapters will help you to explore ways to implement authentication and security, Cloud APIs, and command-line and deployment management. As you hone your skills, you’ll understand how to integrate your new applications with various data solutions on GCP, including Cloud SQL, Bigtable, and Cloud Storage. Following this, the book will teach you how to streamline your workflow with tools, including Source Repositories, Container Builder, and Stackdriver. You'll also understand how to deploy and debug services with IntelliJ, implement continuous delivery pipelines, and configure robust monitoring and alerts for your production systems. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be well versed with GCP’s development tools and be able to develop, deploy, and manage highly scalable and reliable applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Google Cloud Platform for Developers Ted Hunter and Steven Porter • Google Cloud Platform Cookbook by Legorie Rajan PS
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Externalizing configuration and managing secrets


A common aspect of building cloud-native applications is externalizing application configuration. This decouples services from their execution environment, making them more portable across platforms and lifecycles. Additionally, there is a security need to externalize application secrets such as API keys and passwords, as storing these values in unsecured plain text represents a significant vulnerability.

Google Cloud offers a wide variety of tools and services for managing application configuration. Some of these tools are specific to App Engine, while others are more broadly available to the platform as a whole. The flexibility, complexity, and overall security of each approach varies. Developers will need to determine which solution is best for their specific needs.

Application configuration files

On Google App Engine, the primary method of externalizing application configuration is through the use of the app.yaml configuration file. In addition...