I am running n1-standard-1 (1 vCPU, 3.75 GB memory) Compute Instance , In my android app around 80 users are online write now and cpu Utilisation of instance is 99% and my app became less responsive. Kindly suggest me the workaround and If i need to upgrade , can I do that with same instance or new instance needs to be created.
Since your app is running already and users are connecting to it, you don't want to do the following process:
shut down the VM instance, keeping the boot disk and other disks
boot a more powerful instance, using the boot disk from step (1)
attach and mount any additional disks, if applicable
Instead, you might want to do the following:
create an additional VM instance with similar software/configuration
create a load balancer and add both the original and new VM to it as a backend
change your DNS name to point to the load balancer IP instead of the original VM instance
Now, your users will be randomly sent to a VM that's least-loaded to see the application, and you can add more VMs if your traffic increases.
You did not describe your application in detail, so it's unclear if each VM has local state (e.g., runs a database) or there's a database running externally. You will still need to figure out how to manage the stateful systems such as database or user-uploaded data from all the VM instances, which is hard to advise on given the little information in your quest.
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I'm trying to set up a Staging VM for a site that's in production that I have just inherited. The site is running Wordpress/Woocommerce and has not been updated in a while. The VM it's hosted on is running an old version of PHP. Obviously, this all needs to be fixed up but I'm unfamiliar with GCP Compute Engine. Also any attempt to run backup/clone plugins crashes the site and requires a restore from the daily snapshot which is very annoying.
Is it possible to clone the VM/disk to a new instance, point that at a temporary domain, and test/update the site? I have been trying to do this for a while now without much luck any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Creating a clone of an existing VM is possible and quite easy.
Create a snapshot of the VM. If possible stop the VM before doing this to ensure 100% accuracy - this way you will have exact snapshot of the drive without any errors. You can do it while the VM is running too if stopping it is out of the question.
Create a VM from the shapshot - select as a boot disk a snapshot that you've just created. Remember to assign a static public IP to this VM (unless you want it changed after VM restart and since you're going to do some configuration this would likely happen). You can change the VM's specs at this time too - nothing stops you from adding/removing CPU's, RAM etc. It may well be that your VM is underutilised and you can use something smaller to save costs. Or the opposite.
Start the machine. Now you can modify your WP configuration to point to a new domain. Depending on the SSL certificate - you can either use external one or the one provided by GCP (most convinient solution).
If you already own a domain you want to use for staging you can host it in Cloud DNS or at some other provider - just point it to the external IP you just reserved.
If you will be hosting your domain in the Cloud DNS then you will find necessary infomration in the documentation about managed zones (domains).
You can also consider creating a new VM and setting it as a template for creating a group of VM's (managed autoscaled group) and creating an external HTTPS load balancer in front of it. But this adds a little to the complexity so it's just my idea if you needed to handle a lot more traffic.
I have a compute engine instance on google cloud which is running fine. user base is increasing and I wish to upgrade to a bigger compute engine in terms of cpu and memory.
What is the most easy way to do such migration?
What is the snapshot, image, persistent disk features in google compute engine? Are they anyway useful to my task?
I figured it out. Lennert answer is good. I will add few more things to complete it. You can always stop a VM, edit the CPU/memory and restart the VM. But this action may change the external IP address and cause lot of issues. You can handle it but it may cause further downtime. You may have to update the new IP address at DNS and inside the code. One way to avoid this hassle is that you should Reserve a static IP adreess [in console, go to NETWORKING > EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS > RESERVE A STATIC IP ADDRESS]. If you do this, your ip address will not change once you restart the VM.
Image is aka Operating System. While creating a VM, you are asked to choose a boot disk, disk which is used to boot your VM from. You can select from pre-defined images.
Snapshot is the copy of the disk. If it is a boot disk, it contains the operating system image too. We can create a snapshot of an existing disk and use it as the boot disk while creating new VM.
Persistent Disk is the disk that can persists even if you delete the VM [provided you have deselect the option of deleting it while deleting the VM]. We can delete VM and use a persistent disk to create new ones. We can simply pay for persistent disk only, without having any VM.
The easiest way is to stop the machine, change the machine type from the console and start the machine again. No need to create backups (snapshots), new VM's, etc.
I'm new to GCE and want to migrate my web site there. I created a VM instance group hoping. I installed all the packages and set it up a couple days ago. But today I noticed my VM instance group has a different name (postfix, to be exact), and the disk is flushed empty. Is it possible to restore its status, or at least make sure it won't get wiped out again? I'm so surprised that GCE wiped out everything and I wonder if I'm missing something during setup.
A few details in case they are related:
I'm using a trusty image for the VM.
The cloud storage is chosen to be a regular persistent disk.
It was working with emphemeral IP, and yesterday I started to use Cloud DNS to host my domain. I should have used a static IP, but that mistake shouldn't cause the VM instance group to be flushed...
I'm using cloud sql as the database service.
Maybe I should just use VM instance, given I don't have much traffic now?
Any help will be greatly appreciated~
I have a perl job that runs for 5 mins at the top of every hour. What is the most cost effective way of running this job on the Google Cloud infrastructure? Running a compute engine VM seems too heavy-weight for this since I'd get charged for the other 55 mins of no use. I don't understand the "Managed VMs" well enough, but it seems like this might be an option, but I'm not sure if pricing is rounded to the hour. Does anyone have any ideas what the best option is so that I only get charged for 120 mins of usage (24 times run * 5 minutes). The script also uses some image processing binaries, so converting to Python won't do the trick.
Managed VMs are linked to Google App Engine. If you have an App in GAE, managed VMs are used to configure the hosting environment for you App using VMs that run on Google Compute Engine and these applications are subject to Java and Python run time. This link can give you an idea on pricing on GAE, however Perl is not a supported language in GAE.
On GCE, you can start up an instance, do the task and then delete the instance without deleting the persistence disk, this will allow you to recreate the instance using this disk, however you will still be charged for the provisioned disk space and you will need to create a script that will spin up the instance and delete it. You can also create a snapshot of your disk and recreate your instance based on the snapshot, this will be little bit less expensive that keeping the disk.
Also, you should look at the type of persistence disks (PD) on GCE, at this link, take a look at the examples provided, since based on your operation, regular PD or SSD PD can make a big difference on price.
You can use the pricing calculator to estimate your charges
When you deploy to App Engine using a managed VM, an compute engine instance (managed by google) is created for you. All request to App Engine will be forwarded to the created compute engine instance.
To run your script in App Engine as a Managed VM, you will have to dockerize your project, as the managed VM runs a docker container.
I don't see a reason to use App Engine managed VM (just for running a script), as the cost will be same as using a compute engine instance.
Probably the most cost effective way is to create a script that:
Launches a compute engine instance
Install perl
Copies your script to the instance
Runs you script in the created instance
To schedule the execution, you can put at home/office a cron job that executes the above script.
I am new to GCE. I was able to create new instance using gcutil tool and GCE console. There are few questions unclear to me and need help:
1) Does GCE provides persistent disk when a new instance is created? I think its 10GB by default, not sure though. What is the right way to stop the instance without loosing data saved on it and what will be the charge (US zone) if say I need 20GB of disk space for that?
2) If I need SSL to enable HTTPS, is there any extra step I should do? I think I will need to add firewall as per the gcutil addfirewall command and create certificate (or install it from third part) ?
1) Persistent disk is definitely the way to go if you want a root drive on which data retention is independent of the life cycle of any virtual machine. When you create a Compute Engine instance via the Google Cloud Console, the “Boot Source” pull-down menu presents the following options for your boot device:
New persistent disk from image
New persistent disk from snapshot
Existing persistent disk
Scratch disk from image (not recommended)
The default option is the first one ("New persistent disk from image"), which creates a new 10 GB PD, named after your instance name with a 'boot-' prefix. You could also separately create a persistent disk and then select the "Existing persistent disk" option (along with the name of your existing disk) to use an existing PD as a boot device. In that case, your PD needs to have been pre-loaded with an image.
Re: your question about cost of a 20 GB PD, here are the PD pricing details.
Read more about Compute Engine persistent disks.
2) You can serve SSL/HTTPS traffic from a GCE instance. As you noted, you'll need to configure a firewall to allow your incoming SSL traffic (typically port 443) and you'll need to configure https service on your web server and install your desired certificate(s).
Read more about Compute Engine networking and firewalls.
As alternative approach i would suggest deploying VMs using Bitnami. There are many stacks you can choose from. This will save you time when deploying the VM. I would suggest you go with the SSD disks, as the pricing is close between magnetic disks and SSDs, but the performance boost is huge.
As for serving the content over SSL, you need to figure out how will the requests be processed. You can use NGINX or Apache servers. In this case you would need to configure the virtual hosts for default ports - 80 for non-encrypted and 443 for SSL traffic.
The easiest way to serve SSL traffic from your VM is generate SSL certificates using the Letsencrypt service.