Google Cloud Application Architecture Cont.

Pt. 1 Constructing Our Foundation

With our roster filled out, it’s time to start the fun. We will design our architecture using these 11 APIs and services provided by Google Cloud. We are building a fictional eCommerce application for selling goods over the internet. Starting with Compute Engine as the foundation, we will construct a highly scalable and secure system for running our application. I will be using Figma for the illustration/topology, with a key for identifying boundaries and connections along with a stack for holding our APIs.

If you had not had the chance I highly recommend reading the previous articles detailing each API to be used in this journey.

Google Cloud Application Architecture

Pt. 0, Building Our Toolbox

When deciding to run an application there’s nothing more integral than the server running your code. It’s ensures your application is served to clients throughout the internet. It contains all business logic, processes and routes for your application. As you app grows you may horizontally scale your load by distributing services across servers or vertically scale by increasing processing power. However when initially starting, it’s general practice to develop your application as a monolith with a single server.

Compute engine is a virtual machine that sits upon an OS for running applications. This will hold all business logic for our application and serve all static content to clients. It’s apart of the free tier with a f1-micro instance that comes with 0.6GB of RAM and 30GB of persistent SSD storage.

This will be enough for development of our application. We next need databases to store data and state.

Google offers a variety ways to store and manipulate data with Cloud Datastore and Storage being two of their most popular options. Datastore is a NoSQL database which automatically handles sharding and replication along with SQL like Queries. They offer a SQL database called Cloud SQL, however it’s not apart of the free tier. For storing data such as media and files Google offers Cloud Storage. It comes equipped with object lifecycle management and 4 tiers of storage ranging from multi-regional to coldline. Coldline is used for data that is rarely accessed or needed. While multi-regional is used for accessing data at low latency across regions.

We know have two APIs for storing data for our application needs. Our application can now run with these 3 integral parts. However, it would be nice to have a way to monitor our services to ensure everything runs as expected and if problems occurs we can easily detect them, step in Stackdriver.

Stackdriver is a cloud managing system bought by Google in 2014. It aggregates metrics, log, and events from your application and integrates them into one platform. It great for monitoring CPU usage, debugging problems, tracing latency, and much more. No longer as a developer do you have to setup a separate system to monitor you app.

We can now monitor our application and stay notified of errors, uptime, and more. Our 1st stage is now complete and we have an application with all necessary APIs and services.

Related posts:

For the past couple of months, I have found myself in a “writers’ funk.” Now, this may be different for every writer out there in the world, but for me, this funk has consisted of procrastination…

Greetings Constellation team. Although we’ve been in stealth mode busily working behind the scenes our platform and vision hasn’t gone unnoticed. Over the past few weeks we’ve been inundated with…

Even if you have business experience processing payments online can be a real pain. Here again because the internet is booming, new businesses offering payment solutions are starting right and left…