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Google Compute Engine High Availability and Best Practices: Instance Groups

The document discusses high availability best practices for Google Cloud services including Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It recommends: 1) Creating VM instances across multiple availability zones and regions to ensure applications can continue working even if a zone or region fails. 2) Using managed instance groups and load balancing to provide redundancy, auto-healing, and scaling of VM instances. 3) Leveraging startup and shutdown scripts to automate tasks and ensure clean instance shutdowns. 4) Deploying Cloud SQL databases as regional resources across zones for high availability, and selecting locations close to related applications. 5) Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for enterprise-grade storage management with high availability

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93 views3 pages

Google Compute Engine High Availability and Best Practices: Instance Groups

The document discusses high availability best practices for Google Cloud services including Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It recommends: 1) Creating VM instances across multiple availability zones and regions to ensure applications can continue working even if a zone or region fails. 2) Using managed instance groups and load balancing to provide redundancy, auto-healing, and scaling of VM instances. 3) Leveraging startup and shutdown scripts to automate tasks and ensure clean instance shutdowns. 4) Deploying Cloud SQL databases as regional resources across zones for high availability, and selecting locations close to related applications. 5) Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for enterprise-grade storage management with high availability

Uploaded by

tasneem bilal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Google Compute Engine High Availability and Best Practices

To minimize failures, design your Compute Engine applications to be tolerant of errors,


network failures, and unexpected disasters. A robust system should be able to handle errors
correctly, for example by redirecting traffic from the failed instance to the active instance
and be able to run automatically after a restart.
To design an error-tolerant system, create virtual machine instances across at least two
availability zones located in two regions. This ensures that even if a zone or an entire region
goes down, your application can continue working. If all of your instances are hosted in the
same zone or region, your application will not be resilient to failure of Google infrastructure.
Instance Groups
GCP provides managed instance groups, a group of virtual machine instances that serve a
common purpose. With a managed instance group, traffic can be routed to multiple virtual
machines via load balancer, so if any individual instance fails, service is not disrupted.
Managed instance groups also provide the following features:
 Autoscaling—automatically scales the number of VM instances in the group when
loads increase
 Autohealing—performs regular health checks, and if a VM instance is unhealthy,
automatically recreates it.
 Supports multiple zones—you can create a managed instance group across several
availability zones in the same Google Cloud region.

Load Balancing
GCP provides managed load balancing that helps you manage high loads of traffic, to avoid
overwhelming VM instances. The load balancer service provides:
 Forwarding rules—deploy applications across multiple regions using regionally
managed instance groups. You can configure forwarding rules to distribute traffic to
all virtual machines in that region. Each forwarding rule can use a single external IP
address, through which users can access your application.
 Global load balancing—deploy instances in multiple regions using global load
balancing. HTTP/HTTPS load balancing traffic allows you to run your application near
to the geographical location of your users—for example, if you have users in Europe,
you can route them to VM instances of the application running in a European Google
Cloud region.
 Redundancy—achieve redundancy by load balancing between regions. If one region
is not available, traffic is automatically routed to another region, while your service
can still be accessed using the same external IP address.
 Autoscaling—automatically add or remove instances when load increases or
decreases, and load balance between instances in a managed instance group.
Startup and Shutdown Scripts
Google Compute Engine provides start-up and shutdown scripts that are executed when an
instance starts or stops. These scripts can automate tasks such as installing software,
updating, backing up, and generating logs. Importantly, the scripts run in any event an
instance is shut down—even unintentionally.
These scripts are an effective way to create a bootstrap procedure for your instances and
shut them down cleanly. Instead of using a custom image to configure the instance, you can
use a startup script. After each restart, the startup script runs and can be used to install or
update software, and ensure the appropriate services are running.
The shutdown script can perform important actions like closing connections, saving state of
transactions and backing up data.

Google Cloud SQL High Availability


Google Cloud SQL is a managed database service that supports database engines including
SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL, and can connect to almost any application. It provides
backup and replication capabilities for high availability. Below we cover some of the high
availability features provided by Cloud SQL.
Learn more about Google Cloud database services in our guides:
 Google Cloud SQL: MySQL, Postgres and MS SQL on Google Cloud
 Google Cloud SQL Pricing, Quotas, and Limits:   A Cheatsheet for Cost Optimization
 SQL Server on Google Cloud: Two Deployment Options

Cloud SQL Highly Available Instances


When creating a Cloud SQL instance in Google Cloud, you can choose a location where the
instance will live, and its data will be stored. Cloud SQL can be deployed as a zonal resource,
which is stored in two availability zones, a primary zone and a secondary zone.
However, you can also create a highly available Cloud SQL instance which is defined as a
regional resource, and is deployed across multiple zones in one or more regions.
It is highly recommended to choose the same location for the database and the related
Compute Engine instances or App Engine applications (for example, applications accessing
the database), to reduce latency and improve availability.
Cloud SQL Regional and Multiregional Locations
You can create a highly available Cloud SQL instance in two types of locations:
 Regional location—specific geographical locations, such as New York.
 Multiregional location—an extended geographic area that includes two or more
geographic locations, such as the United States.
The only difference between regional and multiregional locations is for backup purposes. A
multiregional instance can save backups in multiple regions for higher resiliency.
Here are the regions and how they are grouped into multi-regional locations:
 North America multiregional location (us)—includes Los Angeles, Salt Lake City,
Oregon, Las Vegas, N. Virginia, S. Carolina, Iowa, and Montreal.
 Europe multiregional location (eu)—includes London, Frankfurt, the Netherlands,
Zürich, Belgium, and Finland.
 Asia multiregional location (asia)—includes Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta
 Non-multiregional locations—São Paolo, Sydney
Cloud SQL Use of Availability Zones
Regions are divided into availability zones. Each availability zone is completely independent
from other availability zones in the region. Cloud SQL lets you select the zone for your Cloud
SQL instance, to ensure it is as close as possible to the applications that need to access it.  
For zonal Cloud SQL instances, Cloud SQL lets you select a primary and secondary zone. For
regional or multiregional resources, you can only select the primary zone, and other zones
are selected automatically.

Google Cloud High Availability with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP


NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP , the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution,
delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases
such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set
of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes
integration, and more.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides high availability, ensuring business continuity
with no data loss (RPO=0) and minimal recovery times (RTO < 60 secs).

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