Mete Atamel

.NET 5.0 was released just a few days ago with many new features, improvements, C# 9 support, F# 5 support, and more. .NET 5.0 is the first release of the unified .NET vision that was announced last year. Going forward, there will be just one .NET targeting Windows, Linux, macOS, and more.

Google Cloud already has support for different versions of .NET. You can run traditional Windows based .NET apps on Windows Servers in Compute Engine or on Windows Containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). For modern Linux based containerized .NET apps, there’s more choice with App Engine (Flex), GKE and my favorite Cloud Run. Not to mention, the .NET Core 3.1 support in Cloud Functions is currently in preview for serverless .NET functions.

I got around to updating my Knative Tutorial from Knative v0.16.0 to the latest Knative Serving v0.18.0 release and Knative Eventing v0.18.1 release.

In this short blog post, I want to outline a couple of minor issues I encountered during my upgrade. Note that I skipped v0.17 altogether, some of these changes might have happened in that release.

Istio Installation

The biggest change I encountered is how Istio is installed for Knative. In previous releases, I simply pointed to the yaml files in the latest Istio version in third_party folder of Knative Serving.

Introduction

We recently announced a new feature, Events for Cloud Run for Anthos, to build event driven systems on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). In the announcement, we also stated that the solution is based on open-source Knative.

In this blog post, I want to further explain the relationship between this new feature and Knative. I also want to convince you that our solution is an easier way to deploy Knative compliant event consuming services on Google Cloud.

Building microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provides you with maximum flexibility to build your applications, while still benefiting from the scale and toolset that Google Cloud has to offer. But with great flexibility comes great responsibility. Orchestrating microservices can be difficult, requiring non-trivial implementation, customization, and maintenance of messaging systems.

Cloud Run for Anthos now includes an events feature that allows you to easily build event-driven systems on Google Cloud. Now in beta, Cloud Run for Anthos’ event feature assumes responsibility for the implementation and management of eventing infrastructure, so you don’t have to.

Challenges in connecting services

When I think about my recent projects, I probably spent half of my time coding new services and the other half in connecting services. Service A calling Service B, or Service C calling an external service and using the result to feed into another Service D.

Connecting services is one of those things that ‘should be easy’ but in reality, it takes a lot of time and effort. You need to figure out a common connection format for services to use, make the connection, parse the results, and pass the results on. I’m not even mentioning error handling, retries and all those production readiness type features that you ultimately need to do.

My colleague Felipe Hoffa recently published a blog post titled Get started with BigQuery and dbt, the easy way. More specifically, he showed how to install dbt in Google Cloud Shell, configure it and manually run it to create a temporary dataset in BigQuery. This is great for testing dbt + BigQuery but how do you run this kind of setup in production?

dbt documentation states that Running dbt in production simply means setting up a system to run a dbt job on a schedule, rather than running dbt commands manually from the command line.

I finally got around to updating my Knative Tutorial from Knative v0.14.0 to the latest Knative v0.16.0 release. Since I skipped v0.15.0, I’m not sure which changes are due to v0.15.0 vs. v0.16.0. Regardless, there have been some notable changes that I want to outline in this blog post. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Feel free to let me know in the comments if there are other notable changes that I should be aware of.

.NET for Google Cloud Functions (Alpha)

I spoke at many .NET conferences over the last 3-4 years and one of the top requests I always received was: When will .NET be supported on Cloud Functions?

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good answer for a while. That all changed last month with the following tweet from Jon Skeet from our C# team:

I'm thrilled that .NET support is coming to Google Cloud Functions, along with the .NET Functions Framework. Sign up for the public alpha at https://t.co/nASIACFCrg

Read More →

.NET Core 3.1 updates on Google Cloud

.NET Core 3.1 was released on December 3rd, 2019 and is a LTS release, supported for three years.

In Google Cloud, you could already deploy .NET Core 3.1 containers in Cloud Run (see cloud-run-dotnetcore-31) and also in App Engine flexible environment with a custom runtime.

We recently extended .NET Core 3.1 support in a couple of ways:

1. Cloud Shell now supports .NET Core 3.1.
2. App Engine flexible environment runtime now supports .NET Core 3.1.

.NET Core 3.1 in Cloud Shell

Inside Cloud Shell, you can see the latest 3.1.301 version:

Motivation

When I started working from home in mid-March, I was totally obsessed with COVID-19 news. I was constantly checking number of cases and news from the UK (where I currently live) and from Cyprus (where I’m originally from). It took me a couple of weeks to realize how unproductive this was. I started limiting myself to check for news once a day. This definitely helped me to regain sanity and productivity but it was manual.