Google Cloud Platform Can Benefit DevOps

google cloud platoform devops

Introduction to Devops:

Ever since its introduction, DevOps has led to a paradigm shift in the software industry, resulting in enterprises adopting the tech to make their software development process faster, more cost-effective, and resilient. However, to make this possible, DevOps relies on various practices like automation, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD), configuration management, etc. Apart from these, DevOps also makes use of Cloud Computing for a vast majority of operations. 

Role of Cloud in DevOps:

Cloud is an integral aspect of DevOps that aids in just about every step of its successful operations. From enabling improved collaboration to allowing the effortless building of experimental test environments for quickly prototyping solutions, and more, Cloud Computing plays a vital role in the hassle-free and simple implementation of DevOps.

Hence, organizations today are rapidly adopting secure Cloud platforms, like AWS, Azure, etc. along with DevOps, for enhanced security, effortless resource accessibility, unparalleled collaboration, and increased efficiency and quality of the final products.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one such high-performance infrastructure for cloud computing used by Cloud DevOps engineers to build software delivery pipelines, deploy and monitor services, and manage and learn from incidents.

This article elaborates on the correlation between DevOps and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the role it plays in DevOps operations. 

What is Google Cloud Platform(GCP)?

Among the various cloud platforms available, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), by Google, is one of the largest computing networks that help organizations implement business-critical IT projects to grow and thrive. It is a suite of cloud services hosted on Google’s infrastructure that are intelligent, secure, and highly flexible. 

GCP consists of a set of physical assets and virtual resources that are contained in Google's data centers around the globe. Moreover, it provides a serverless environment to connect cloud services with a large focus mainly on the microservices architecture. 

With GCP, organizations get an end-to-end hosted, scalable cloud platform, unlike its competitors like Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure that guarantees a high-quality development environment for DevOps applications. Other beneficial features of Google Cloud Platform include:

  • On-demand services. 
  • Broad network access. 
  • Rapid elasticity. 
  • Measured services.
  • Resource pooling. 
  • Better UI for improved user experience. 

What is Google Cloud Platform(GCP) DevOps?

Google Cloud Platform has become a prominent choice for Cloud DevOps engineers as it offers support to several DevOps tools that make the DevOps process faster and easier. It supports DevOps efforts by providing services to build, store, and deploy apps. 

Furthermore, it ensures apps are built with better and long lead times and development cycles. GCP is a reliable service that embraces and enables DevOps and helps it achieve its objective of streamlining communication within teams, accelerate development, identify and fix bugs and issues, and iterates without delays.  

Steps to Adopt DevOps on Google Cloud Platform:

Here are the various steps that ensure the successful adoption of DevOps on the Google Cloud Platform:

  • Software Release Workflow: Follow a GCP code pipeline that involves Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery for fast and reliable delivery of features and updates. It builds, tests, and deploys code on the system every time changes and release process models are defined.
  • Build & Test Code: Build code and test it to produce software or feature packages that are ready to deploy, with the help of GCP code. It follows a continuous process, where multiple builds are processed concurrently.
  • Automate Deployment: GCP code deploy is used to automate deployment to any instances or on-premises servers. This makes it easier to rapidly release new features and avoid downtime during application deployment. 
  • Unify CI/CD: GCP Codestar is used for CI/CD, as it helps quickly develop, build, and deploy applications to the GCP dashboard. It offers a specified user interface for the efficient management of software development activities in one place and faster set-up of the entire CD toolchain. 
  • Build & Deploy Microservices: GCP offers highly scalable, high-performance Container Management services, Google Elastic Container service, for the development and deployment of microservices architecture using containers and serverless computing. This container management service supports Docker containers, enabling efficient execution of applications. 
  • Provision, Configure & Manage: GCP Cloud formation enables teams to create and maintain resources, perform provisioning, and maintain updates. Moreover, it creates templates and models to monitor and enforce infrastructure compliance.

Apart from these steps, the team needs to integrate consistency, Cloud monitoring, trunk-based development, version control systems into the process and use Cloud Build, Cloud Registry, etc. to ensure successful implementation and adoption of DevOps on GCP.

Google Cloud Platform DevOps Services:

DevOps services that can be deployed on GCP are: 

  • Google App Engine: A Platform as a Service (PaaS), Google App Engine is a cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications. Designed to scale automatically based on the application's traffic and consumed resources during code execution, this DevOps service is highly flexible and completely manageable. It supports a wide range of language stacks, like Python, Java, Node.JS, .NET, Ruby, Go, or PHP.
  • BigQuery: This is a cloud-based big data analytics web service used for processing extensive read-only data sets. BigQuery helps predict business outcomes easily and generate reports, securely.
  • BigTable: A scalable NoSQL database, BigTable offers various features like high throughput with low latency, no-downtime cluster resizing, and flexible automatic replication for workload optimization. 
  • Google Cloud Datastore: A document-oriented cloud database, Google Cloud Datastore offers features like ACID transactions, queries like SQL, indexes, etc. It automates sharding and replication to create a highly available and reliable database that scales automatically to manage your application load.
  • Kubernetes Engine: An effective DevOps tool, Kubernetes Engine helps better organize workloads within a cluster. It automates application deployment, scaling, and management through Kubernetes containers and dynamically adjusts the CPU and memory requests in response.
  • Cloud Console: It provides a detailed view of each DevOps element in the cloud and enables teams to deploy, scale, and identify production issues in a simple web-based interface. It is an efficient GCP service that enables teams to easily manage the cloud-based delivery cycle. 
  • Google Compute Engine: With Google Compute Engine, the secure and customizable compute service, teams can deliver virtual machines on-demand and run workloads on Google's physical hardware. It offers predefined and custom machine types, transparent maintenance, and the highest compliance and security. 
  • Google Deployment Manager: Another prominent GCP service that enables users to specify the resources needed for the application in a declarative format. This is enabled through yaml, Python, or Jinja2 templates that parameterize the configuration and allow the reuse of common deployment paradigms.

Working of DevOps on Google Cloud Platform:

As stated earlier in the article, GCP offers various services for the successful functionality of DevOps for building, storing, and deploying apps. These involve various solutions that further enable the GCP DevOps services. These are:

  • Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure as Code is an important GCP service that helps realize the GCP DevOps goals by automating repeatable tasks. It helps the development and operations team to address the core functionalities of the application without dealing with repetitive tasks like provisioning, configuration, and deployments. Moreover, it helps in easy creation, updates, and removal of resources throughout GCP.  
  • Configuration Management: GCP DevOps enables configuration management to automate deployment, architecture, and compliance for all servers. It is a prominent functionality that helps teams perform codification of system configurations and code reviews, develop CI/CD pipelines, and resolve issues before they enter the production environment. 
  • Continuous Integration: Like DevOps, Continuous Integration has a vital role in GCP, as it helps scale without any restrictions of maintenance and improvement of efficiency and productivity of development. 
  • Continuous Delivery: As GCP DevOps is largely dependent on Continuous Delivery, it uses it to ensure end-to-end automation from source to production, which further ensures rapid application or feature shipping, risk reduction, quality improvement, and easy scalability. 

How Google Cloud Platform Can benefit DevOps?

From offering improved performance and security to dedicated continuous expansion, redundant backups, live migration to virtual machines, and more, there are various benefits of implementing DevOps on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A few of these are:

  • Rapid Start: Offers ready-to-use IoT services, which prevents the need to set up or install the software. 
  • Built to Scale: Uses GCP services to manage a single instance and scale up to thousands, which further helps make flexible compute resources. 
  • Fully Managed Services: Get fully managed services leveraging the GCP resources. 
  • Automation: Uses automation to build faster and more efficiently and automate tasks and processes like development, testing, and deployment workflow. 
  • Secure: It uses user permission and policies to limit user access to particular services.

Google Cloud Platform Vs. AWS:

Google Cloud and AWS are two prominent Cloud platforms, competing against one another to be the best. Though, both are highly functional and beneficial, here is a side-by-side comparison of the two to help you make an informed decision based on your project requirements.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • A suite of Google's public cloud computing resources and services.
  • It is open-source and supports portability. 
  • Relies on partners such as Egnyte for Hybrid support.
  • It has its tiered networking framework.
  • Supports multiple tools that make DevOps implementation efficient.
  • Offers various environments like IaaS, PaaS, and Serverless computing, Google Cloud storage, powerful data analytics, etc.
  • Makes applications faster and more reliable. 
  • Secure, cloud service platform developed by Amazon. 
  • Open and flexible with enterprise-friendly services. 
  • Offers managed virtual tape infrastructure for a hybrid environment.
  • It has no tiered networking framework.
  • Suitable for projects that need high computing power.
  • Offers a range of automated functionalities including configuration, scaling, setup, and more.
  • Allows quick Cloud access with limitless capacity.

Conclusion:

DevOps, along with Cloud, is effectively reshaping the modern software and application development landscape and helping enterprises create shared and automated workflows and utilize the full potential of a Cloud infrastructure. Over the past few years, it has become an effective operating model that automates the tasks of both developers and operations teams, using various best practices to increase organizations’ ability to deliver quality products and services at a high velocity. 

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