Once you have implemented your application infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform, you will need to maintain it. Although you can set up Google Cloud to automate many operations tasks, you will still need to monitor, test, manage, and troubleshoot it over time to make sure your systems are running properly.
This course will walk you through these maintenance tasks and give you hands-on demonstrations of how to perform them. You can follow along with your own GCP account to try these examples yourself.
Learning Objectives
- Use the Cloud Operations suite to monitor, log, report on errors, trace, and debug
- Ensure your infrastructure can handle higher loads, failures, and cyber-attacks by performing load, resilience, and penetration tests
- Manage your data using lifecycle management and migration from outside sources
- Troubleshoot SSH errors, instance startup failures, and network traffic dropping
Intended Audience
- System administrators
- People who are preparing to take the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification exam
Prerequisites
- Google Cloud Platform: Fundamentals course or experience with Google Cloud Platform
Resources
- The GitHub repository for this course is at https://github.com/cloudacademy/managing-gcp.
Another problem you might run into is network traffic dropping between an instance and other systems. The first thing to check is the firewall rules for the network the instance is in. The default network has firewall rules that allow http, https and a few other protocols. If any of those rules were deleted, that could be the reason for your network issues.
If instead of putting the instance in the default network, you put it in another network that you created, then make sure you created the appropriate firewall rules. When you create a new network, it doesn't come with any firewall rules. So you have to create some to allow any traffic.
Another potential reason for network traffic dropping, is the idle connection timeout. Idle TCP connections are disconnected after ten minutes. If your instance initiates or accepts long lived connections, then you should adjust the TCP keep alive settings. This will prevent connections from being dropped by the idle timeout.
Since the timeout is ten minutes, you need to set the TCP keep alive to something less than ten minutes so connections will never be idle for that long. You need to set the keep alive on either the instance or the external client, depending on which side initiates connections.
Be aware that you should only set a TCP keep alive if you are having problems with connection timeouts. If you are not having that sort of problem, then setting a TCP keep alive will just increase network traffic for no good reason.
And that's it for this lesson.
Lectures
Course Introduction - Monitoring - Logging - Error Reporting and Debugging - Tracing - Testing - Storage Management - Cloud SQL Configuration - Cloud CDN Configuration - Instance Startup Failures - SSH Errors - Conclusion
Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. In his most recent venture, he founded and led a cloud-based training infrastructure company that provided virtual labs for some of the largest software vendors in the world. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand. His activities outside of work have included riding an elephant and skydiving (although not at the same time).