March 1, 2020
Google Cloud provides the capability of terminating a VPN connection with a VPN Gateway.
The problem is that the VPN Gateway - at the moment - is relatively limited in capabilities.
One of the missing capabilities I would have liked to see implemented is the NAT capability.
VPNs can be used to connect the machines of two different parties.
Although this is usually not the best architectural pattern, since a connection on the public internet encrypted at the Transport Layer is often a better option, it’s relatively common in more legacy environments.
When a VPN is used in this way, it is very common to incur in an IP space collision, and therefore it becomes required to use some form of NAT.
Let’s see how to implement this scenario in Google Cloud without terminating the VPN directly on an instance (which is possible but has its problems, and maybe we’ll be discussing it some point in the future).
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December 10, 2019
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen problems allocating resources in the Google Cloud Platform in the Frankfurt region.
The problem seemed to have occurred due to the high requests Google customers made to sustain their businesses during the Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday period.
Making some searches on Google, I’ve found out that this is not the first time it occurs, and this is not only a GCP problem since AWS and Azure had similar incidents.
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September 22, 2019
Last week, in a previous article, I’ve introduced you to gcsc (Google Cloud Snapshot Cleaner).
I’ve just released the version 0.2.0 of it, and it has a lot of clean-ups done, both in the code and the user experience.
There are also some new features, but the one I’m more satisfied with, is the introduction of the http subcommand, to expose an HTTP server.
The webserver will listen to any URI and Methods, and the request will trigger the snapshot clean-up.
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September 16, 2019
I’ve just tagged the first version (0.1.0) of gcsc (Google Cloud Snapshot Cleaner).
The idea behind this small software is to create a more flexible way to keep the Google Cloud Disks Snapshots tidy.
Google Cloud does provide a very nice way to automatically snapshot your disks, leveraging the resource policies.
This is very nice, since it allows you to be sure that the Google Cloud always and reliably snapshots your disks.
The tool also allows you to auto-delete the snapshots after a certain period, but I found this feature a little bit too limited.
The main reason is that it does not allow you to have complex retention policies.
In fact, the tool only allows to set a single expiration date for all snapshots.
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August 30, 2019
After less than a week from achieving the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, I took the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Preparing this exam, I found odd the fact that Google provides three case studies to bring to the exam.
I was even more impressed by the number of questions around those cases.
It felt odd since it felt like you could prepare very well those three case studies and be advantaged in the exam.
Overall, I think that this is not the case, since having prepared the cases, will only help you not having to re-read the whole case before answering the questions.
Also, I found myself to read the case name, read the question, read the answers, choose the answer, and then read the case text again, just to be sure.
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August 24, 2019
As for a company certification goal, I decided to certify as a Google Associate Cloud Engineer as well as Google Professional Cloud Architect this month.
The Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification is mainly focused around GCP standard operations, such as managing IAM, osLogin, as well as many other core services such as compute instances, Cloud SQL and many more.
I found the certification to be fairly well balanced, with maybe a little bit a skew toward IAM and security, which I do appreciate due to the importance of these topics.
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September 28, 2008
Last week, Google unveiled Android 1.0.
The first device that will feature this OS is going to be HTC Dream.
The Android platform is Google’s reply to Apple’s iOS.
Or, at least, this is my read on the matter and the meaning I’m giving it in this article.
The main difference between Android and iOS is that Android will allow multiple companies to create competing Android devices.
On the one hand, this will create more options for the consumers; on the other hand, it will create a less coherent experience.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog