Google Cloud for DevOps Engineers

Sandeep Madamanchi

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839211270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Certification Guides in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

Explore site reliability engineering practices and learn key Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services such as CSR, Cloud Build, Container Registry, GKE, and Cloud Operations to implement DevOpsKey Features• Learn GCP services for version control, building code, creating artifacts, and deploying secured containerized applications• Explore Cloud Operations features such as Metrics Explorer, Logs Explorer, and debug logpoints• Prepare for the certification exam using practice questions and mock testsBook DescriptionDevOps is a set of practices that help remove barriers between developers and system administrators, and is implemented by Google through site reliability engineering (SRE). With the help of this book, you'll explore the evolution of DevOps and SRE, before delving into SRE technical practices such as SLA, SLO, SLI, and error budgets that are critical to building reliable software faster and balance new feature deployment with system reliability. You'll then explore SRE cultural practices such as incident management and being on-call, and learn the building blocks to form SRE teams. The second part of the book focuses on Google Cloud services to implement DevOps via continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). You'll learn how to add source code via Cloud Source Repositories, build code to create deployment artifacts via Cloud Build, and push it to Container Registry. Moving on, you'll understand the need for container orchestration via Kubernetes, comprehend Kubernetes essentials, apply via Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and secure the GKE cluster. Finally, you'll explore Cloud Operations to monitor, alert, debug, trace, and profile deployed applications. By the end of this SRE book, you'll be well-versed with the key concepts necessary for gaining Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification with the help of mock tests.What you will learn• Categorize user journeys and explore different ways to measure SLIs• Explore the four golden signals for monitoring a user-facing system• Understand psychological safety along with other SRE cultural practices• Create containers with build triggers and manual invocations• Delve into Kubernetes workloads and potential deployment strategies• Secure GKE clusters via private clusters, Binary Authorization, and shielded GKE nodes• Get to grips with monitoring, Metrics Explorer, uptime checks, and alerting• Discover how logs are ingested via the Cloud Logging APIWho this book is forThis book is for cloud system administrators and network engineers interested in resolving cloud-based operational issues. IT professionals looking to enhance their careers in administering Google Cloud services and users who want to learn about applying SRE principles and implementing DevOps in GCP will also benefit from this book. Basic knowledge of cloud computing, GCP services, and CI/CD and hands-on experience with Unix/Linux infrastructure is recommended. You'll also find this book useful if you're interested in achieving Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification.

Section 1: Site Reliability Engineering – A Prescriptive Way to Implement DevOps

The core focus of this section is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). The section starts with the evolution of DevOps and its life cycle and introduces SRE as a prescriptive way to implement DevOps. The emphasis is on defining the reliability of a service and ways to measure it. In this section, SRE technical practices such as Service-Level Agreement (SLA), Service-Level Objective (SLO), Service-Level Indicator (SLI), error budget, and eliminating toil are introduced and are further elaborated. Fundamentals and critical concepts around monitoring, alerting, and time series are also explored to track SRE technical practices. However, SRE technical practices cannot be implemented within an organization without bringing cultural change. Google prescribes a set of SRE cultural practices such as incident management, being on call, psychological safety, and the need to foster collaboration. This section also explores the aspects critical to building SRE teams and provides insights into the SRE engagement model. It's important to note that the start of the section introduces services in Google Cloud to implement DevOps through the principles of SRE; however, the details of those services are explored in the next section.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, DevOps, SRE, and Google Cloud Services for CI/CD
• Chapter 2, SRE Technical Practices – Deep Dive
• Chapter 3, Understanding Monitoring and Alerting to Target Reliability
• Chapter 4, Building SRE Teams and Applying Cultural Practices

Chapter 1: DevOps, SRE, and Google Cloud Services for CI/CD

DevOps is a mindset change­ that tries to balance release velocity with system reliability. It aims to increase an organization's ability to continuously deliver reliable applications and services at a high velocity when compared to traditional software development processes.

A common misconception about DevOps is that it is a technology. Instead, DevOps is a set of supporting practices (such as, build, test, and deployment) that combines software development and IT operations. These practices establish a culture that breaks down the metaphorical wall between developers (who aim to push new features to production) and system administrators or operators (who aim to keep the code running in production).

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is Google's approach to align incentives between development and operations that are key to building and maintaining reliable engineering systems. SRE is a prescriptive way to implement DevOps practices and principles. Through these practices, the aim is to increase overall observability and reduce the level of incidents. The introduction of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline enables a robust feedback loop in support of key SRE definitions such as toil, observability, and incident management.

CI/CD is a key DevOps practice that helps to achieve this mindset change. CI/CD requires a strong emphasis on automation to build reliable software faster (in terms of delivering/deploying to production). Software delivery of this type requires agility, which is often achieved by breaking down existing components.

A cloud-native development paradigm is one where complex systems are decomposed into multiple services (such as microservices architecture). Each service can be independently tested and deployed into an isolated runtime. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has well-defined services to implement cloud-native development and apply SRE concepts to achieve the goal of building reliable software faster.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• DevOps 101 – evolution and life cycle
• SRE 101 – evolution; technical and cultural practices
• GCP's cloud-native approach to implementing DevOps

Understanding DevOps, its evolution, and life cycle

This section focuses on the evolution of DevOps and lists phases or critical practices that form the DevOps life cycle.

Revisiting DevOps evolution

Let's take a step back and think about how DevOps has evolved. Agile software development methodology refers to a set of practices based on iterative development where requirements and solutions are built through collaboration between cross-functional teams and end users. DevOps can be perceived as a logical extension of Agile. Some might even consider DevOps as an offspring of Agile. This is because DevOps starts where Agile logically stops. Let's explore what this means in detail.

Agile was introduced as a holistic approach for end-to-end software delivery. Its core principles are defined in the Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/), with specific emphasis on interaction with processes and tools, improving collaboration, incremental and iterative development, and flexibility in response to changes to a fixed plan. The initial Agile teams primarily had developers, but it quickly extended to product management, customers, and quality assurance. If we factor in the impact of the increased focus on iterative testing and user acceptance testing, the result is a new capacity to deliver software faster to production.

However, Agile methodology creates a new problem that has resulted in a need for a new evolution. Once software is delivered to production, the operations team are primarily focused on system stability and upkeep. At the same time, development teams continue to add new features to a delivered software to meet customers' dynamic needs and to keep up with the competition.

Operators were always cautious for the fear of introducing issues. Developers always insist on pushing changes since these were tested in their local setup, and developers always thought that it is the responsibility of the operators to ensure that the changes work in production. But from an operator's standpoint, they have little or no understanding of the code base. Similarly, developers have little or no understanding of the operational practices. So essentially, developers were focused on shipping new features faster and operators were focused on stability. This forced developers to move slower in pushing the new features out to production. This misalignment often caused tensions within an organization.

Patrick Debois, an IT consultant who was working on a large data center migration project in 2007, experienced similar challenges when trying to collaborate with developers and operators. He coined the term DevOps and later continued this movement with Andrew Shafer. They considered DevOps as an extension of Agile. In fact, when it came to naming their first Google group for DevOps, they called it Agile System Adm...