Automating Deployment Services for Google Cloud Infrastructure
Learn Objectives:
- Understand the cloud resource manager hierarchy within Google Cloud in a detailed way.
- Understand how quotas protect Google Cloud customers.
- Use labels more effectively in organizing resources.
- Understand the behavior of budget alerts in Google Cloud.
- Using BigQuery as an Analytical Tool to Analyze Billing Data.
INFRASTRUCTURE AUTOMATION
1. What’s the benefit of writing templates for your Terraform configuration?
- Allows you to abstract part of your configuration into individual building blocks that you can reuse (CORRECT)
- Allows you to run configuration management software.
- Allows you to hardcode properties for your resources
Correct: Templates enable efficient re-use of configurations pertaining to multiple deployments and hence save time while providing consistency. Repeating similar properties of configuration elements may be better abstracted into templates that can be reused at other places to improve redundancy and the efficiency of your deployment process. This is especially important in large-scale environments or when practicing the principles of infrastructure as code.
2. What does Google Cloud Marketplace offer?
- A centralized billing platform for all Google Cloud services and applications
- Production-grade solutions from third-party vendors who have already created their own deployment configurations based on Terraform (CORRECT)
- A platform for trading VM instances
Correct: Of course! Google Cloud Marketplace offers quite a few production-grade solutions from second-party vendors, many of which come with a pre-configured deployment setup using Terraform. It’s therefore easy for you to deploy these relevant solutions quickly and easily without having to think much about writing or configuring the infrastructure yourself, thus saving you time and minimizing the potential for errors. In addition, pre-built configurations follow the best practices in the industry, which helps in getting the deployment process smoother.
MANAGED SERVICES
1. How are Managed Services useful?
- Managed Services may be an alternative to creating and managing infrastructure solutions. (CORRECT)
- If you have an existing infrastructure service, Google will manage it for you if you purchase a Managed Services contract.
- Managed Services are more customizable than infrastructure solutions.
- Managed Services are pay services offered by 3rd party vendors.
Correct: Exactly! Managed services in Google Cloud cost you an alternative for building and maintaining your own infrastructure for data processing. All services are purely managed by Google, meaning that they handle the underlying infrastructure scaling and maintenance while you focus on higher-level functions, such as analyzing data or building applications. Managed services usually offer more efficient and cost-reducing solutions compared with maintaining infrastructure because you remove the complexity of managing platforms, making downtime much less likely and reliability more easily guaranteed. BigQuery and Cloud Pub/Sub are some examples from this list: the former for data analytics while the latter is for messaging.
2. Which of the following is a feature of Dataproc?
- It doesn’t integrate with Cloud Monitoring, but it has its own monitoring system.
- It typically takes less than 90 seconds to start a cluster. (CORRECT)
- Dataproc billing occurs in 10-hour intervals.
- Dataproc allows full control over HDFS advanced settings.
Correct: Managed services like the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) can simply get you right to a cluster without you having to fuss over setting up the infrastructure yourself.