Day 0 with Google Cloud
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Today was gonna be exciting. The day started with some ad-hoc tasks that required my attention, completed them by lunch. We had applied last night for credits by Google, and they were on the way.
These credits in itself were a primary reason we were attracted to using Google Cloud, another was the start of a new project. While starting with any cloud service is always a breeze, shifting your current architecture from one service provider to another isn’t so easy. We have been working on AWS for sometime now, and it was about time we explored other cloud service providers.
Before today, i had a lot of time understanding the cloud platform by Google but my practical knowledge of Google Cloud has been limited to App Engine. But today was gonna be different, a lot different.
So as customary with me, i started with the command line tool for the platform and GCLOUD utility is at the service. Rich commands with exhaustive control to at my fingertips. Ah! That feel, when your authentication is done by OAuth tokens, individually, for each user managed by platform itself.
Next up was to check the page that GCLOUD’s after authentication redirect has landed me to. Well, being a spiderman (Web Developers), i knew best links should be on the header, and Voila! ‘Go to my console’ haha Take me! Take me away!!
For anyone saying that UI can’t be as good as CLI, here was the answer. Everything you need, at the click of a button. Best things, source code integration and SSH from browser based terminal. While Push-to-Deploy integration with GitHub and BitBucket has been around for some time now, even for the free users, having it in the enterprise edition has its own benefits.
It was about 90 minutes i spent with platform and it has amazed me in that short time frame. Enough for me to search for best practices. A good tool, needs to be handled with care and proper understanding. Pricing calculator was a good start to understand the tradeoffs, i will need to make in order to make most out of the system while optimizing for least cost.
Since evening, i have been exploring various possibilities of the tool now. Click to deploy, Big Query, Cloud DNS and Endpoints, Google APIs, Containers using Docker, da daa do doo da daa.. its all one might need.
Let’s hope it is so. Development starts in Morning. #GoodNight
