GCP Senacor Cloud Hackathon 2021

Welcome to the Senacor Cloud Container Hackathon 2021 and the corresponding Google Cloud Platform documentation! Google in special has been evaluated by Sebastian Neb.

Goal

The goal of the Hackathon was to tryout the different serverless / container services on GCP beyond e.g. Kubernetes. Targets where therefore Cloud Functions, App Engine and Cloud Run. Aspect to consider where the following:

• What container / serverless services are available on Google?
• How does the integration with other Google services look like (VPC, Managed SQL, Secrets Management, IAM, ...)
• Scalability? How is the service reacting to load? How fast does it actually scale beyond what the docs state.
• Authentication (e.g. any OIDC provider like Google, GitHub or Facebook)?
• Integration with Logging / Monitoring with Stackdriver and export to other systems?
• Costs? How much does the service cost? What is the pricing model?
• Custom domains + certificate management? Also including mTLS between the different services (LoadBalancer ***> Application)?
• Only internal access? No public facing internet access?
• Debugging capabilities? How fast and efficient can a developer debug? Is debugging on production environments possible without interfering with e.g data protection?
• Automatic deployment & setup? How good are those services automateable?
• API Management? Canary deployments? A/B testing?

Service selection

After looking at Googles offerings for container / serverless services, I decided to look further into the following services:

• App Engine
• Cloud Function
• Cloud Run

Prerequisites

I did setup a Google project beforehand where I activated all needed APIs beforehand. I also deleted the default network and created a custom VPC.

Order of tryouts

I started with App Engine in general. More specific with App Engine Flexible. After that continued with App Engine Standard. Following that I continued with Cloud Run and closed with Cloud Functions.

Therefore the Readme reading order is:

1. App Engine
2. App Engine Flexible
3. App Engine Standard
4. Cloud Run
5. Cloud Functions
6. Monitoring and Logging
7. Load Test

Integration with other google services

All Google services can run with a custom service account and custom permissions. Due to the availabitlty of the metadata server, you can always receive a short lived access token to access other Google services out of the box.

Switiching

Due to the fact that you can configure each path of the LoadBalancer to serve a specific path, it is really easy to switch to another serverless service without interfering with the API. Also Canary tests are easy doable there.