Introducing Application Development with Cloud Run

Objectives:

• A general understanding of Cloud Run
• Understand how how high availability, low end-user latency and developer productivity are important architectural drivers for web based applications today
• Understand the advantages of serverless on Google Cloud.
  
  Topics Covered
• This module gives a general overview of Cloud Run. If you’re new to Cloud Run (or even to Google Cloud), this will be a great introduction.

Understanding Cloud Run

Objective:

• Understand Container Images and Containers
• Understand how Cloud Run is different from an always-on server
• Implement the deployment of a container image to Cloud Run (hands-on lab)
• Understand auto-scaling and on-demand containers

Topics Covered

• You can use any language, any library and any binary. Cloud Run expects your app (in a container image) to listen on a port and respond to HTTP requests.

• Use a docker repository on Artifact Registry to store your images: Cloud Run only deploys from there.

• Cloud Run uses autoscaling to handle all incoming requests

• Pay for use pricing model

• No background tasks: Container lifetime is only guaranteed while handling requests

• There is no persistent storage: Store data downstream

• Cloud Run is portable (containers and Knative) 

Building Container Images

Objective:

• Deeply understand what is inside a container image
• Package an application into a container image with Buildpacks (hands-on lab activity)
• Understand that Dockerfiles are a lower-level and more transparent alternative to Buildpacks

Topics Covered

• The contents of a container image (deep dive)

• There are two ways to build container images: Buildpacks (hands-off) and Docker (you’re in control).

• Cloud Run supports both source-based and a container image based workflow

• The most important considerations of building a secure container image.

Developing with Cloud Run

Objectives:

• Understand the advantages of the shutdown lifecycle hook
• Understand how to avoid request queuing
• Implement new versions of an application (hands-on lab activity)
• Implement gradual traffic migration (hands-on lab activity)

Topics Covered

• Container lifecycle: Idle vs serving and Shutdown lifecycle hook

• Cold starts: Min instances

• Container readiness

• The service resource and what it describes

• Configuring memory limits and CPU allocation

• Deploying a new revision

• Traffic steering (tagging, gradual rollouts) 

Configuring Service Identity and Authorization

Objectives:

• Understand that every action on a Cloud resource is actually an API call
• Understand how and why to limit the permissions in your Cloud Run service to only specific and necessary API calls
• Understand the process needed to make the default permissions of a Cloud API more secure
• Use the client libraries to call other Google Cloud services (hands-on lab activity)

Topics Covered

_{Cloud IAM}

• Service account, policy binding, roles, types of members, resource hierarchy (in practice)
• Service accounts
• Cloud Run IAM roles 

_{Cloud Run}

• Default service account
• Risks of using the default service account 

Serving Requests

Objectives:

• Use Cloud CDN to improve the reliability and performance of an application
• Use path-based routing to combine multiple applications on one domain
• Route incoming requests to the Cloud Run service closest to clients

Topics Covered

• Custom Domains

• Global Load Balancer (URL Map, Frontend, Backend services)

• Benefits and drawbacks of GLB over custom domain

• Types of GLB Backends

• Multi-region load balancing

• Multi-regional applications challenges

• Cloud CDN 

Using Inbound and Outbound Access Control

Objectives:

• Connecting your project to resources with a private IP
• Implementing controls to prevent outbound traffic to dangerous or unwanted hosts
• Implementing filters for inbound traffic using content-based rules
• Implementing controlled access to only specific service accounts 

Topics Covered:

• Ingress settings
• Cloud Armor
• Using Cloud IAM to protect services: Understand how authenticated requests (IAM + OIDC tokens) work (builds on Module 5)
• VPC, VPC Access Connector
• Egress settings 

Persisting Data

Objectives:

• Understand how to connect your application with Cloud SQL to store relational data
• Use a VPC Connector to reach a private Memorystore instance
• Understand how to connect with Cloud Storage, Spanner and Firestore 

Topics Covered

• Understanding why you need to store data externally when running a workload on Cloud Run.

• Connect with Cloud SQL from Cloud Run: Understand how it works (managed Cloud SQL Proxy)

• Managing concurrency as a way to safeguard performance (understand why and when)

• Connecting with Memorystor

• VPC Connector:  Challenges with scaling Memorystore (throughput)

• Briefly introduce Cloud Storage, Firestore and Cloud Spanner, while reinforcing how the client libraries use the built-in service account to connect (Module 5 is prerequisite knowledge).

• Multi-region data storage (and what Spanner and Firestore can do for you) 

Implementing Service-to-Service Communication

Objectives:

• Using Cloud Pub/Sub to send messages between services
• Discovering the URL of other Cloud Run services
• Receiving events from other Google Cloud services
• Processing background tasks asynchronously 

Topics Covered

• Understanding Cloud Pub/Sub

• Understanding topics, push subscriptions

• Idempotency (Handling retries and at-least-once invocation. Event ID, design for resume, or use a lease.

• Handling undeliverable message

• How to asynchronously schedule a background task on a different service

• Cloud Tasks, and when to choose it over Cloud Pub/Sub

• Benefits of using Pub/Sub to pass messages over making sync RPC requests

• Learn about services in Google Cloud with a built-in integration to push events to Pub/Sub (Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Storage, IOT Core, BigQuery)

• Cloud Scheduler to invoke services on a schedule.

• CloudEvents

• EventArc, and how to consume Audit logs.  What to expect now, and how EventArc will develop over time 

Orchestrating and Automating Serverless Workflows

Objectives:

• Understand the capabilities of Cloud Workflows
• Learn how to model a simple workflow with steps and conditional jumps
• Integrating Cloud Run with Cloud Workflows
• Understand how to invoke workflows 

Topics Covered

• Conceptual overview of Cloud Workflows

• Invoking and passing parameters

• Understand steps and jumps

• Defining, using and passing values with variables

• Using the switch statement to add logic

• Workflow visualization

• Calling HTTPS endpoints

• Calling an authenticated Cloud Run service

• Example: polling API for completion