Gilchrist Alasdair - Cloud Native Apps on Google Cloud Platform

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FIRST EDITION 2022

Copyright BPB Publications, India

ISBN: 978-93-55511-232

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Alasdair Gilchrist is an industry veteran of over 25 years spent in IT, Security, Networking, Mobile Telecoms and lately in Cloud Computing. He is the author of many technical books spanning IT, Google Cloud Platform and Industrial technologies, such as Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things. Currently he works full-time as a Google Cloud Architect and part-time as a technical author.

Gopinath Balakrishshnan is a Cloud advisor/Architect, Technical Advisory Board member of a startup, Advisory Council member of California State University, Chico, CA, member of Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, Judge panel for Stevie and CODiE awards, Director of Technical Steering Committee, Moja Global.

Specialized in product engineering, distributed systems/cloud platforms, built/managed high performance teams , led large transformation programs. Sales driven system engineering/solution architecting roles, worked with medium/large enterprises for their new application/infrastructure design, delivered proof-of-concept/pilots, engaged with several C level leaders at early stage startups (Series B to D) and built technology partnerships, support their digital transformation journey and help solve their business and technology challenges by helping build/migrate/modernize the application/infrastructure that can scale with better economics and resilient using Google cloud solutions with a cloud native approach.

Adnan Ahmed Khan has 7 years of experience in Software Development, System Design and Automation. He has been a practitioner of Cloud Technologies from Google and AWS. Adnan has pursued MSc. in Computer Science from the American International University of Bangladesh. He has worked with startups like G&R, Pathao and Deligram. He is currently working as a Software Developer in Red.Digital Limited, Dhaka. His day to day life involves design, development and managing cloud-native applications.

I would first like to start with thanking BPB for giving me the opportunity to write this book. But writing the book is a team effort so I would like to thank my team mates.

A huge thank you to my editor for her patience, diligence and professionalism when editing the book. (It could never have been done without you SB).

I also need to thank Mr. Gopinath and Mr. Adnan who worked as the technical reviewers everything they so professionally contributed was a huge value add to the book.

Thank you all at BPB and I hope you the reader enjoy the book.

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how to design develop and deploy cloud native apps on the Google Cloud Platform. The book is designed to provide theoretical lessons reinforced by step-by-step hands-on tutorials. The value of this approach is that after reading the book you will know why, where and when to use cloud native applications but most importantly you will also know how to build, test and deploy your own cloud native apps on the Google Cloud Platform.

Applications that are designed, developed and deployed by leveraging cloud-based technologies are known as Cloud-Native Applications. Cloud Native apps are built, tested and run using all the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. However, the term, cloud native application, is not just another buzz-word as these applications have a real design purpose, which is to succeed in todays fast-paced and competitive software market. As a result, cloud native applications aim to revolutionize software delivery by simultaneously leveraging cloud platform tools, techniques, and technologies whilst also supporting cloud platform operations and DevOps capabilities.

What makes cloud native applications different from traditional web apps is that to be successful in application development today we need to speed up building new applications, optimize existing ones, and find ways to rapidly deploy them into production. Minimizing the time getting the product to market and to profit is critical in business. To this end organizations have developed operational and development strategies that involves methodologies such as DevOps and Agile development, that utilize cloud platform architectures to ensure high quality whilst also delivering continuous improvement and rapid deployment. Devops delivers the functions of continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines (CI/CD). This is the technique used in DevOps for automated delivery of the product into production.

Cloud native apps are typically designed around microservices, which amongst their other benefits allow you to create, maintain, improve or scale one component of an application without having to refactor the whole application. Microservices are typically deployed in containers, as this provides mobility through the write once and deploy anywhere, design model as containerized apps can run on any cloud platform. For scalability, resiliency and performance the containers are typically run in Kubernetes clusters, which is a container orchestrator and cluster manager.

The cumulative effect of leveraging these techniques and methods in cloud native application development means that the apps can bring tangible value to the organization by delivering products that users need at the pace the business demands.

Over the 13 Chapters of this book you will learn the following:

In this chapter we describe what a cloud native application is and lists its characteristics. You will learn about the modern concepts of Devops and the CI/CD process in particular. We discuss the Google Cloud Platform service model and you will understand the difference between each offered service. Also, through practical hands on learning you will be able to deploy a sample application to Cloud Functions, Google App Engine, and Cloud Run.