Serverless

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. Read More ↗︎

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

.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 . Read More →

In part 3 of the blog series, I talked about how we transformed our Windows-only .NET Framework app to a containerized multi-platform .NET Core app. This removed our dependency on Windows and enabled us to deploy to Linux-based platforms such as App Engine (Flex). On the other hand, the app still ran on VMs, it was billed per second even if nobody used it, deployments were slow and most importantly, it was a single monolith that was deployed and scaled as a single unit. Read More →

It’s hard to keep with Knative releases with a release every 6 weeks. I finally managed to update my Knative Tutorial for the latest Knative v0.12.0. In this blog post, I want to outline some of the differences I’ve observed. Knative Serving Knative Serving has been pretty stable in the recent releases and Knative Serving v0.12.0 is no exception. I didn’t need to update my tutorial specifically for this release. Read More →

The default Knative Installation instructions for Google Kubernete Engine (GKE) is problematic (see bug 2266). In this post, I want to outline what the problem is, tell you what I do, and also provide you the scripts that work for me until a proper solution is implemented either in gcloud or Knative. The problem The default Knative Installation instructions tell you to create a GKE cluster as follows: gcloud beta container clusters create $CLUSTER_NAME \ --addons=HorizontalPodAutoscaling,HttpLoadBalancing,Istio \ --machine-type=n1-standard-4 \ --cluster-version=latest --zone=$CLUSTER_ZONE \ --enable-stackdriver-kubernetes --enable-ip-alias \ --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes=1 --max-nodes=10 \ --enable-autorepair \ --scopes cloud-platform Notice the Istio add-on. Read More →

In my previous post, I talked about Knative v0.9.0 and some of the eventing changes in the latest release. I’ve been playing with Knative v0.9.0 since then to read Google Cloud Pub/Sub messages using PullSubscription and I ran into a rather fundamental issue that baffled me for a while. I’d like to outline the problem and the solution here, just in case it’s useful to others. Knative Services as eventing sinks In my PullSubscription, I could define Kubernetes Services as event sinks as follows: Read More →

Knative has been evolving pretty quickly. There’s a new release roughly every 6 weeks with significant changes in each release. Knative v0.7.0 was all about changes in Knative Serving (my post). Knative v0.8.0 was about deprecation of Knative Build in favor of Tekton Pipelines (my other post). Knative Serving v0.9.0 and Eventing v0.9.0 have been released a little over a week ago. In Serving, there’s a v1 API and a number of improvements on autoscaling and cold starts. Read More →