Mete Atamel

In a previous post, I showed how to manage the lifecycle of a virtual machine using Workflows and the Compute Engine connector. This works well when there’s a connector for the resource you’re trying to manage. When there is no connector, you can try to use the API of the resource from Workflows, if there’s one. Alternatively, you can also use my favorite command line tool to manage the resource: gcloud. Or if you’re managing a Kubernetes cluster, maybe you want to call kubectl instead.

I’ve been writing a series of posts to showcase Google Workspace and Google Cloud Workflows integration.

In my first post, I showed an IT automation use case in which a Google Sheets spreadsheet triggers a workflow to create virtual machines in Google Cloud. In the second post, I showed how to feed a Google Sheets spreadsheet with data from BigQuery using a workflow.

In this third and final post of the series, I show how to design a workflow that pauses and waits for human approvals from Google Sheets.

Back in August, we announced the 2nd generation of Cloud Functions with longer request processing times, larger instances, new event sources with Eventarc, and more.

A few weeks ago, .NET 6 support (public preview) was silently added to Cloud Functions.

Let’s see how to deploy some .NET 6 functions to Cloud Functions 2nd gen.

Functions Framework for .NET

Functions Framework for .NET is the easiest way to create .NET functions for consuming HTTP or CloudEvent requests.

In my previous post, I showed how to trigger a workflow in Google Cloud from a Google Sheets spreadsheet using Apps Script. In this post, I show how to do the reverse: write to Google Sheets from a workflow in Google Cloud.

Use case

Imagine you have some dataset in BigQuery. Periodically, you want to query and extract a subset of the dataset and save it to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. You can implement such a process with Workflows quite easily.

In a previous post, I showed how to use a GitOps approach to manage the deployment lifecycle of a service orchestration. This approach makes it easy to deploy changes to a workflow in a staging environment, run tests against it, and gradually roll out these changes to the production environment.

While GitOps helps to manage the deployment lifecycle, it’s not enough. Sometimes, you need to make changes to the workflow before deploying to different environments. You need to design workflows with multiple environments in mind.

GitOps takes DevOps best practices used for application development (such as version control and CI/CD) and applies them to infrastructure automation. In GitOps, the Git repository serves as the source of truth and the CD pipeline is responsible for building, testing, and deploying the application code and the underlying infrastructure.

Nowadays, an application is not just code running on infrastructure that you own and operate. It is usually a set of first-party and third-party microservices working together in an event-driven architecture or with a central service orchestrator such as Workflows.

Is it possible to integrate Google Workspace tools such as Calendar, Sheets, and Forms with Workflows? For example, can you trigger a workflow from a Google Form or a Sheet? Turns out, this is not only possible but also easier than you might think. Let me show you how with a sample use case.

Use case

Imagine you are an administrator in charge of allocating virtual machines (VM) in your cloud infrastructure to users. You want to capture user requests with the specifications for the VMs, have an approval step for the request, and then create the VM with an automated process.

A few weeks ago, we announced third-party event sources for Eventarc, with the first cohort of third-party providers by our ecosystem partners. This blog post describes how to listen for events from one of those third-party providers, Datadog, and route them to a service in Google Cloud via Eventarc.

Datadog is a monitoring platform for cloud applications. It brings together end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs to make your applications and infrastructure observable. In Datadog, you can create monitors that track metrics, events, logs, integration availability, and network endpoints, and you can set alert thresholds on those monitors. Once these thresholds are reached, Datadog notifies your teams or services via email, Slack, and now a Google Cloud service via Eventarc.

In Workflows, it’s easy to chain various services together into an automated workflow. For some use cases, you might need to pause workflow execution and wait for some input. This input could be a human approval or an external service calling back with data needed to complete the workflow.

​​With Workflows callbacks, a workflow can create an HTTP endpoint and pause execution until it receives an HTTP callback to that endpoint. This is very useful for creating human-in-the-middle type workflows. In a previous blog post, Guillaume Laforge showed how to build an automated translation workflow with human validation using callbacks.

Careful what you wish for

My last in-person conference before the pandemic was NDC London back in January 2020. I distinctly remember being quite tired at the beginning of 2020. For me, 2019 had been a long year with 50+ speaking engagements at a variety of conferences all around the world. I just wanted to take a short break in early 2020.

Little did I know that the short break would turn into a 2.5 year long break due to a global pandemic. I’m extremely grateful that I was able to continue working and speaking in many online conferences during the pandemic. However, as the pandemic dragged on, my enthusiasm for online events diminished. I sorely missed connecting with other speakers, meeting attendees, and exploring the city I was speaking in.