Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification: 3. Designing Compute Systems - Important Things To Know

GCP offers a number of compute services including Compute Engine, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Functions. Compute Engine is Google’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. The core functionality provided by Compute Engine is virtual machines (VMs). App Engine is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) compute offering. With App Engine, users do not have to configure servers. They provide application code that is run in the App Engine environment. There are two forms of App Engine: App Engine Standard and App Engine Flexible. Kubernetes Engine is a managed service providing Kubernetes cluster management and Kubernetes container orchestration. Kubernetes Engine allocates cluster resources, determines where to run containers, performs health checks, and manages VM lifecycles using Compute Engine instance groups. Cloud Functions is a serverless compute service well suited for event processing. The service is designed to respond to execute code in response to events within the Google Cloud Platform. Other issues to consider when designing infrastructure are managing state in distributed systems, data flows, and monitoring and alerting.
 

1. Understand when to use different compute services. GCP compute services include Compute Engine, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Functions. Cloud Engine is an IaaS offering. You have the greatest control over instances, but you also have the most management responsibility. App Engine is a PaaS that comes in two forms. App Engine Standard uses language-specific sandboxes to execute your applications. App Engine Flexible lets you deploy containers, which you can create using Docker. Kubernetes Engine is a managed Kubernetes service. It is well suited for applications built on microservices, but it also runs other containerized applications. Cloud Functions is a service that allows you to execute code in response to an event on GCP, such as a file being uploaded to Cloud Storage or a message being written to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic.
2. Understand Compute Engine instances’ optional features. These include the variety of machine types, preemptibility, and Shielded VMs. Also understand how service accounts are used. Understand managed instance groups and their features, such as autoscaling and health checks.
3. Know the difference between App Engine Standard and App Engine Flexible. App Engine Standard employs language-specific runtimes, while App Engine Flexible uses containers that can be used to customize the runtime environment. Be familiar with additional services, such as the App Engine Cron Service and Task Queues.
4. Know the Kubernetes architecture. Understand the differences between master cluster instances and node instances in Kubernetes. Understand the organizing abstractions, including Pods, Services, ReplicaSets, Deployments, PersistentVolumes, and StatefulSets. Know that an Ingress is an object that controls external access to services running in a Kubernetes cluster.