Super charge your Google Cloud Learning with Jump Start Solutions

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Google Cloud - Community

10 min readApr 20, 2023

Last Update :29-Aug-2023
Updated article with updated grouping of Jump Start Solutions and 1 new solution: Summarize large documents with Generative AI.

There are numerous challenges that you face as you commence your journey to architecting and deploying a solution on Google Cloud.

Let us put things into perspective here. Say you wanted to deploy a 3-Tier Web application on Google Cloud. Assuming that you are beginning your journey or even in the middle of that, there are various resources and decisions that you need to read up and build on. Just a few of them are listed here:

What are the various Google Cloud services that you should use? Which are the most suitable for what you are trying out?
Should I use GKE or Cloud Run or App Engine or straight-up deploy on Compute Engine?
What are the various database / storage options available? Which ones should I use?
How do I know which services to enable, how to best apply the principle of least privilege, how do I store and use secrets correctly?

The above are just some of the initial questions that come up. This often leads you to scan through Google Cloud’s documentation, interactive tutorials, codelabs, Architecture Center documents and more. While there is a wealth of information, as a developer, you want to get your work done fast and be given precise steps/guidance on how to do that correctly.

More importantly, you also want to think about the following:

Can I script the whole solution via a best in class Infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform), so that the deployment is repetitive, can be used across teams and can built on or customized further?
What would be the best practices to build out a Logging Infrastructure for the same, which my Operations folks can easily tap into to understand what is going on?
How do I securely build and release updates to this pipeline, as I build out newer features.

All of the above are valid points. While you might not have each of these concerns on day one, these will eventually come up and you will figure them out too. But it takes time, increases the friction in your learning and adoption journey and as a Cloud Provider, these should be provided to you.

So, what’s the solution to this? Ready-made solutions that demonstrate best practices, give you code assets that you can study / modify and with the experience of deploying these via a single-click in your Google Cloud Project/Console environment? Sounds good, doesn’t it?

That’s what Google Cloud Jump Start Solutions are and check out the announcement blog post.

What are Google Cloud Jump Start Solutions?

Let’s understand what Google Cloud Jump Start solutions are as per the definition from the announcement post.

pre-built sample applications and infrastructure best-practices that you can deploy within a few clicks in your own Google Cloud account

Let’s break this down:

pre-built sample applications :A list of sample applications ranging from Three Tier web application, Load Balanced VMs to Log Analysis Pipelines has been made available. Additional applications are on their way soon. More details are available in the post below
infrastructure best-practices : Each of the sample applications comes along with Terraform scripts that you can study to first understand how it was put together and then you can always customize the same.
deploy within a few clicks in your own Google Cloud account: Each application is available in your Google Cloud Console account. Select your project, navigate to the Jump Start Solutions page, select one of the Jump Start applications and follow the instructions to deploy these with a few clicks. It’s that simple.

Let’s dig a little deeper. Each Sample application (Jump Start Solution) comes with:

An Architecture diagram (Built using the Architecture Diagramming Tool. Check it out, if you haven’t).
A Cost Calculator link that provides you an estimated cost of running this solution for a month.
An associated Github page, where you can check out the Terraform scripts, associated documentation and more.

Which Jump Start Solutions are available right now?

The following Jump Start Solutions have been made available at the time of updating this blog post:

To understand what is there in each of the solutions, I suggest that you start with the links above. Each of the solution pages (an example for Three-Tier Web application is shown below) has a couple of buttons right at the top that talks about Deploy in console and View Details.

I suggest to click on the View Details for each of the solution pages, that will take you the following section:

Let’s understand each of these sections, since it gives you a good idea of what is available with each Jump Start Solution:

This is the Architecture of the Jump Start Solution and a description of the same. It helps you understand the flow and how the various services/products interact with each other.
Deploy in console button is designed to directly take you to the Google Cloud Console with the specific solution selected for you and you can then follow the instructions to deploy the same in a Google Cloud Project of your choice with a few clicks and within minutes.
Read solution guide : This is strongly recommended and would be my first choice to read more on the solution. It will also provide you information on the Terraform scripts, what you can customize and if you chose to use a Terraform script to deploy the same rather than the Deploy in console, then how do you do that. Please spend time here to understand what the solution is about, how it works and then go ahead and deploy it.
View pricing estimate is an excellent addition to each solution. Cost Management is important and each solution comes with a Google Cloud Cost Calculator link that has been pre-populated for you with different services that are utilized in the solution and what they will cost for a month. Feel free to play around with it as per your needs and evaluate the pricing further.
Requirements indicate specific things needed to ensure that the solution will be able to deploy directly via your account and Google Cloud Project.
Products used lists down the Google Cloud services/products used.

Now that you have an understanding of what is included in each Google Cloud Jump Start solution, lets see how you can navigate to all the solutions from either the main Solutions page or from the Google Cloud console.

I had previously listed down all the links to the specific solutions, so while you are free to navigate that way, I just wanted to highlight multiple ways to getting down to the Jump Start Solutions and which is what we will check out next.

Let’s navigate to the Google Cloud Jump Start Solutions !

There are multiple ways that you can get to the Google Cloud Jump Start solutions.

Solutions Page

The Jump Start Solutions page is available from main cloud.google.com/solutions page and then you will see the Jump Start Solutions in the left navigation bar as shown below:

Click on that and you are led to the Jump Start solutions that are currently available.

You can also navigate the Jump Start Solutions guide in the Architecture Center:

You can click on any of the above solutions to be led to the specific Solution page.

Google Cloud Console

If you are logged into the Google Cloud Console in your account / Google Cloud project, you can reach to the Jump Start Solutions via the main navigation menu in the top and specifically via the Products and Solutions menu option as shown below:

This will lead to the Jump Start Solutions that are available today. The solutions shown below might look more than the initial ones listed since the listing here has individual applications depending on the stack (e.g. Large data sharing — Golang and Large data sharing — Java).

Clicking on any of these from the in-console experience will directly lead to the solution details and you can deploy instantly.

Google Cloud Jump Start Solution — In Console Experience

The Jump Start solution for Three-tier web app is shown below and we won’t go into the specific of each of the numbered circles below since you will get it by now.

Google Cloud Jump Start Solution in action

Now, let’s see what the experience of deploying one of the Google Cloud Jump Start Solutions looks like.

I am going to navigate to the following link from my Google Cloud Console:

From the list of solutions shown to me, I am going to select Load-balanced managed VMs and I am led to the Solution detail page as shown below:

All I need to do now is to click on the Deploy button and this leads me to the in-console walkthrough that takes me through a step-by-step configuration:

The first step is typically selecting the correct project that you would like to deploy the solutions into. Make sure that you have selected the project for which you have the necessary Administrative rights and that it has the Billing Account /Trial Account attached which will be enough to cover both provisioning of the services and resources in the project but also an approximate cost from the monthly estimate that it has indicated.

Click on the Continue button. This brings up specific configuration details needed for the solution as shown below. This will differ based on each solution. Pay attention to the Deployment name since this will appear in the list of Solution Deployments that we will talk about in a while. Its just a way to reference your current solution instance.

Click on Continue to go to the final Review step as shown below. It will list down the Google Cloud services that need to be enabled (if not enabled) and other necessary service accounts/roles that will be created.

Click on the Deploy button and it will begin the process of deploying the solution. Each solution has provided an approximate amount of time it will take to deploy the solution, so be patient. While the deployment is in progress, you can see that it leads us to the Solution deployments section and that our solution is currently deploying and you can get to see the resources that are being provisioned.

On successful deployment, you will see the following screen:

Let us cover in brief on some key areas to learn more about the solution.

These are the resources that have been created as part of the solution. Keep in mind that these are managed by the Jump Start Solution under the hood and it is recommended that should you need to delete the solution, you should do it via the DELETE option that we will discuss in a while and not individually try to remove the resources.
You can view the Terraform scripts that have been used to generate these resources. This is important, so that if you wish to update / modify the script to suit your requirements, you can use the scripts and modify them accordingly.
Finally there is a guided Interactive Tutorial for the Jump Start Solution that has been deployed. Do go through it to understand what the solution is.

You will also see the solution listed in the Solution deployments section:

If you go to the end of the above Deployed section, you will see a list of actions and a key one will be to look at the application that is being served by the Load Balancer setup.

If you click on View site, you will be led to the sample page as shown below:

Try to refresh this page a few times, and its likely that the page will be served by another VM in the Managed Instance Group.

You can investigate the Load Balancer, Compute Engine, Asset Inventory Links in the Deployed solution too.

Cleaning up

In case you are done with investigating the solution and do not wish to incur any additional cost, you can delete the Solution deployment. Go to the Solution deployments section and from the Actions list, you will get a “Delete” option, a sample is shown below:

Once you confirm the same, the solution and its associated resources will be destroyed.

In Summary

Google Cloud Jump Start Solutions is a great way to begin on your learning journey in Google Cloud, especially around designing well architected solutions for a number of common architectures/solutions. These Jump Start Solutions are available today for you to try out and more are on the way.