Mete Atamel

Recently, I’ve been looking into AsyncAPI, an open-source specification and tools to document and maintain event-driven architectures (EDAs). In this blog post, I want summarize the basics of AsyncAPI and point to some useful links to learn more. In future blog posts, I’ll get into more details of AsyncAPI. AsyncAPI: Why? What? AsyncAPI is an open source initiative with the goal of making event-driven APIs as easy as REST APIs. Fundamentally, it is a specification to define asynchronous APIs, similar to what OpenAPI (aka Swagger) does for REST APIs. Read More →

Cloud Tasks is a fully-managed service that manages the execution, dispatch, and asynchronous delivery of a large number of tasks to App Engine or any arbitrary HTTP endpoint. You can also use a Cloud Tasks queue to buffer requests between services for more robust intra-service communication. Cloud Tasks introduces two new features, the new queue-level routing configuration and BufferTask API. Together, they enable creating HTTP tasks and adding to a queue without needing the tasks client library. Read More →

If you use Workflows, you’ve been crafting your Workflows definitions in YAML (or JSON). You’re probably painfully aware of the limited support you get in your IDE with syntax validation or auto-completion with these YAML definitions. This was due to Workflow’s schema being out of date, as I covered in my previous post last year. I’m happy to report that our team recently updated the Workflows schema with the latest syntax. Read More →

I talked about CloudEvents in the context of event-driven architectures before. In this post, let’s explore CloudEvents in more depth. CloudEvents: Why? What? CloudEvents is a popular specification for describing event data in a common way with the goal of increasing interoperability between different event systems. Google Cloud’s Eventarc, open-source Knative, Azure’s Event Grid, and many more projects rely on CloudEvent specification to define their event formats. CloudEvents, at its core, defines a set of metadata, called “context attributes”. Read More →

Cloud Code is a set of IDE plugins for popular IDEs that make it easier to create, deploy and integrate applications with Google Cloud. Cloud Code provides an excellent extension mechanism through custom templates. In this post, I show you how you can create and use your own custom templates to add some features beyond those supported natively in Cloud Code, such as .NET functions, event triggered functions and more. As a recap, in my Introducing Cloud Functions support in Cloud Code post, I pointed out some limitations of the current Cloud Functions support in Cloud Code: Read More →

In a startup, you need to get to the MVP fast, gather feedback from early adopters, and iterate in a quick cycle. Anything that takes time away from developing and iterating on features delays the launch and that’s a serious problem when time-to-market is crucial. Google Cloud offers products that can help you to build and run your backend services on a fully managed serverless platform, saving time and freeing you from the burden of provisioning and managing infrastructure needed to run those services. Read More ↗︎

Cloud Code has been providing IDE support for the development cycle of Kubernetes and Cloud Run applications for a while now. I’m happy to report that the Dec 2022 version (1.21.0) of Cloud Code now supports Cloud Functions! In this first release of Cloud Functions support, you can: Use the Cloud Functions Explorer to view your project’s Cloud Functions properties and source code. Download your Cloud Functions to edit your code locally, then configure your local workspace to deploy those changes directly from Cloud Code. Read More →

This is a three-part series of posts, in which we summarize Workflows and service orchestration patterns. In this third and final post, we talk about managing workflow life cycles and the benefits of using Firestore with Workflows. If you’re not careful, the workflow definitions you create with YAML or JSON can get out of hand pretty quickly. While it is possible to use subworkflows to define snippets of a workflow that can be reused from multiple workflows, Workflows does not support importing these subworkflows. Read More ↗︎

This is part 2 of a three-part series of posts, in which we summarize Workflows and service orchestration patterns. You can apply these patterns to better take advantage of Workflows and service orchestration on Google Cloud. In the first post, we introduced some general tips and tricks, as well as patterns for event-driven orchestrations, parallel steps, and connectors. This second post covers more advanced patterns. Let’s dive in! Design for resiliency with retries and the saga pattern It’s easy to put together a workflow that chains a series of services, especially if you assume that those services will never fail. Read More ↗︎

For the last couple of years, we’ve been using Workflows, Google Cloud’s service orchestrator, to bring order to our serverless microservices architectures. As we used and gained more experience with Workflows and service orchestration, we shared what he had learned in conference talks, blog posts, samples, and tutorials. Along the way, some common patterns and best practices emerged. To help you take better advantage of Workflows and service orchestration on Google Cloud, we’ve summarized these proven patterns and best practices in a three-part series of blog posts. Read More ↗︎