Google Cloud vs AWS - Comparing in 2023

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both popular cloud computing platforms that offer a wide range of services for businesses and organizations. Both GCP and AWS provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) offerings, allowing customers to build, deploy and run applications in the cloud. 

Here are some key differences between GCP and AWS: 

• Services: GCP and AWS offer a similar set of services, but they may have different names and slightly different functionality. GCP has a strong focus on big data and machine learning, while AWS has a wider range of services and a more established ecosystem of partners and third-party tools. 
• Pricing: GCP and AWS have different pricing models, with GCP generally being more flexible and customizable, while AWS often has a more straightforward pricing structure. GCP also offers sustained-use discounts, which can lower the cost of running long-running workloads. 
• Networking: GCP has a strong emphasis on global networking and offers services such as Google's global load balancer and Cloud VPN, while AWS has a more established ecosystem of partners and third-party tools for networking. 
• Data and Analytics: AWS has a wide range of data and analytics services, including Redshift, RDS, and Elasticsearch, while GCP has a big data focus with services such as BigQuery and Cloud Dataflow. 
• Machine learning: GCP has a strong focus on machine learning, with services such as TensorFlow, Cloud ML Engine, and Cloud Vision API, while AWS also has a range of machine learning services including SageMaker, Rekognition, and Lex. 
• Support: AWS has a more established support system with different levels of support options and a larger community, while GCP has a more limited support system and a smaller community. 

Overall, GCP and AWS are both powerful cloud platforms that offer a wide range of services. The choice between the two will depend on the specific needs of your organization, including the services you require, your budget, and your existing infrastructure.

GCP over AWS and Vice-Versa?

Choosing between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) can depend on several factors, including the specific services and features offered by each platform, the pricing model, and the overall fit with your organization's existing infrastructure and workflow. 

Here are some factors to consider when deciding between GCP and AWS: 

• Services: If your organization has specific needs for big data and machine learning, GCP may be a better choice as it has a strong focus on these areas. On the other hand, if your organization requires a wide range of services and a more established ecosystem of partners and third-party tools, AWS may be a better choice. 
• Pricing: GCP offers more flexible and customizable pricing, while AWS often has a more straightforward pricing structure. GCP also offers sustained-use discounts, which can lower the cost of running long-running workloads. 
• Networking: GCP has a strong emphasis on global networking, with services such as Google's global load balancer and Cloud VPN, while AWS has a more established ecosystem of partners and third-party tools for networking. 
• Data and Analytics: If your organization has a need for data warehousing and business intelligence, AWS has a wide range of services like Redshift, RDS, Elasticsearch, and more, while GCP has a big data focus with services such as BigQuery and Cloud Dataflow. 
• Machine learning: GCP has a strong focus on machine learning, with services such as TensorFlow, Cloud ML Engine, and Cloud Vision API, while AWS also has a range of machine learning services including SageMaker, Rekognition, and Lex. 
• Support: If your organization requires a more established support system with different levels of support options and a larger community, AWS may be a better choice. GCP has a more limited support system and a smaller community. 
• Hybrid and Multi-cloud: If your organization is planning to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, AWS has a more mature offering for hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios, with services such as Outposts and App Runner 

Ultimately, the best choice between GCP and AWS will depend on the specific needs of your organization. It is important to evaluate the services offered by each platform, as well as the pricing, networking, data and analytics, Machine Learning, support, and other factors that are important to your organization.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

They both offer a wide range of services with different Service Level Agreements (SLAs). 

AWS offers an SLA of 99.95% availability for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) services. Additionally, it offers an SLA of 99.99% for its Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon ElastiCache services. 

GCP offers a similar level of availability for its Compute Engine and Persistent Disk services, with an SLA of 99.95%. GCP also offers an SLA of 99.99% for its Cloud SQL and Cloud Datastore services. 

When it comes to SLA, both AWS and GCP offer very similar levels of availability for their core services. However, AWS has a slightly higher SLA for some of its services than GCP. 

It's also important to note that, while SLA is an important factor to consider when choosing a cloud provider, it's not the only one. Other factors such as security, scalability, and pricing should also be taken into account. 

It's always a good idea to thoroughly review the SLA and other details of the services you plan to use with each provider before making a decision, as well as regularly monitor the services to ensure they meet their SLA.

AWS or GCP, Who has better availability region wise

Both AWS and GCP have a global presence, with multiple data centers and availability regions around the world. 

AWS currently has 77 availability regions worldwide and plans to have 84 by the end of 2022. These regions are spread across 24 countries and are designed to provide low latency and high availability for customers. 

GCP has 35 regions worldwide and it is spread across 14 countries. It also has plans to expand to more regions in the future and will have a total of 44 regions available by the end of 2024. 

In terms of region coverage, AWS has more availability regions than GCP. However, it's important to note that the number of regions doesn't necessarily translate to better availability. The availability of service also depends on factors such as network infrastructure, data center design, and disaster recovery capabilities.

The most popular service of AWS and GCP is based on different regions there are other factors such as industry type or use-case that service is more popular but today we will see only region based

• In North America, AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) are among the most popular services. EC2 is widely used for hosting web applications, running big data workloads, and more, while S3 is popular for storing and retrieving files, images, and backups. 
• In Europe, AWS's Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR) are also popular among users. ECS allows users to easily manage and run containerized applications, while ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. 
• In Asia, AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) are among the most popular services. EBS provides block-level storage for use with EC2 instances, while RDS provides a managed relational database service for use with databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. 
• As for GCP, In North America, Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Cloud Storage (GCS) are among the most popular services. GCE allows users to launch virtual machines and configure network and security settings, while GCS is an object storage service that allows users to store and retrieve large amounts of data in the cloud. 
• In Europe, GCP's BigQuery and Cloud SQL are popular among users. BigQuery is a fully managed, cloud-native data warehouse that enables super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google's infrastructure, while Cloud SQL is a fully-managed database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. 
• In Asia, GCP's Cloud Spanner and Cloud Translation API are also popular among users. Cloud Spanner is a fully-managed, horizontally scalable, relational database service, while Cloud Translation API allows developers to easily translate text between thousands of language pairs.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!!

Deploy Spring Boot API Docker Image to GCP Kubernetes Engine

In the previous blog, we build a demo Spring Boot API and deployed it to Docker Hub using GitHub Actions. In this blog, we will deploy that same docker image to Kubernetes.  A quick recap [read].

In order to deploy the docker image to Google Cloud, we need a Google Cloud Account signup for Free Trail, If you don't have a Google Cloud account already it will first show you the billing page. after that, it will redirect you to the landing page. Here we first need to create a project, because in GC everything we do, we do it in a project, and billing is also generated based on that.

Here you can see all the billing-related information based on your use, after that, we need to go to the services section and click on the left burger menu and select Kubernetes Engine - > Cluster.

Here we first need to create a Cluster because then only we would be able to deploy anything. I have selected the Self-Managed Cluster option,  you can select the same or the recommended one which is then managed by Google.

Here we need to enter the Cluster name followed by the Location Type and the rest of the settings we can leave as default, click on Create button which will start the process of creating a cluster and it will 1-2 mins.

So, the Cluster is created successfully with 12GB of Total Memory, and 6 CPUs which should be sufficient for our demo application to run.

The next step is we need to create our deployment file.

 apiVersion: apps/v1  
 kind: Deployment  
 metadata:  
  name: spring-docker-k8s-deployment  
 spec:  
  replicas: 2  
  selector:  
   matchLabels:  
    app: spring-docker-k8s  
  template:  
   metadata:  
    labels:  
     app: spring-docker-k8s  
   spec:  
    containers:  
     - name: spring-docker-k8s  
      image: hemkant/github-actions  
      ports:  
       - containerPort: 5678  

In this deployment file, I am using the same docker image which we deployed to the docker hub, with just one replica.

Next, we need to execute this deployment file and for that, we can use Google Cloud shell. 

 

Go to Cluster and click on three dots and Connect, this will open the shell prompt in the browser for us to run kubectl commands, after that we need to run the command to authenticate with GC.

After that, we should be able to upload the deployment file which we created.

Once your file is uploaded you can run ls command to check, and you should see the file in the directory.

Next, we need to run "kubectl apply -f <filename.yaml>"

This command will create the Pods inside the cluster which we created, from the menu go to Workloads.

Here we can see the deployment is done and the status is ok with 2/2 Pods. Next, we need to expose the traffic on a specific port which is 8080 for our application.

After a couple of mins, you can go to the Service & Ingress menu to get the external endpoint to access this application from the public domain. 

That's it we have successfully deployed our Spring Boot API docker image to Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine. Deployment YAML

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

SpringBoot API with GitHub Actions, Docker Deployment

Today, We are going to explore and see other possibilities of the most important aspect of SDLC, Which is Continues Integration & Continues Deployment aka CI/CD. There are many tools (Jenkins, Bamboo, etc) available in the market which we can use to Build, Test and Deploy the changes on servers.

In the above diagram, the entire CI/CD is taken care of by Jenkins which is a 3rd party tool. In the real world, this required additional resources (infrastructure) and a team to manage this.

So, since We are using GitHub is there a way we can reduce this additional stuff. Yes, we can use GitHub Actions where the entire CI/CD will run on the same platform. We all have seen this option in GitHub but very rarely do we go there.

To understand it better, let's build a sample Spring Boot application --> Push the code in GitHub -->Trigger Github Actions --> Docker hub.

First, we need to create a repository in GitHub and then go to the Actions tab and click new Workflow options, here we will get many workflow options that we want to integrate with our application, but for this demo, we need to select " Java with Maven".

After you click on configure it will create a maven.yml file which you need to merge with your code, but before that, we need to update the yml to support our application build.

and yes that's it so whenever we merge the code in the master branch the GitHub Actions workflow will trigger and build the code, but we want is that after building the code the, latest changes should also deploy to the Container Registry I am using Docker here, but you can use any other.

In order to push the changes to the docker, we first need to create a repository in the docker hub and after that, we need to tell our maven.yml file about this new step.  

 # This workflow will build a Java project with Maven, and cache/restore any dependencies to improve the workflow execution time  
 # For more information see: https://help.github.com/actions/language-and-framework-guides/building-and-testing-java-with-maven  
 name: Java CI with Maven  
 on:  
  push:  
   branches: [ "master" ]  
  pull_request:  
   branches: [ "master" ]  
 jobs:  
  build:  
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest  
   steps:  
   - uses: actions/checkout@v3  
   - name: Set up JDK 17  
    uses: actions/setup-java@v3  
    with:  
     java-version: '17'  
     distribution: 'temurin'  
     cache: maven  
   - name: Build with Maven  
    run: mvn clean install  
   - name: Build & Push Docker Image  
    uses: mr-smithers-excellent/docker-build-push@v5  
    with:  
     image: hemkant/github-actions  
     tags: latest  
     registry: docker.io  
     dockerfile: Dockerfile  
     username: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_USERNAME}}  
     password: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_PASSWORD}}  

I have used another image here which will perform all the operations docker-build-push. after that, the credentials to access the docker hub is stored in GitHub secrets.

 

After all of these let's commit some code and see, how all these work together. In the below screenshot, we can see all the workflow triggers whenever I committed the code.

and let's also see if the steps we mentioned in our maven.yml file are followed or not, for that we can click on any item to check and it will show us all the details.

 And the docker file which I used here is 

 FROM openjdk:17  
 EXPOSE 8080  
 ADD target/github-actions.jar github-actions.jar  
 ENTRYPOINT ["java", "-jar", "/github-actions.jar"]  

let's check the Build & Push Docker Image step. looks like everything is fine here, and image is pushed to Docker Hub

The last thing we should also check is Docker Hub, looks good the image is pushed successfully.

 

We have covered all the points which we discussed at the beginning of this blog. Code Repo.

In the next blog, We will deploy the same image on the Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes. 

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

Spring Boot API with MongoDB Atlas

In this blog, We are going to explore and learn the Spring Boot application with MongoDB Atlas. For that, we need to first need to create an account at https://cloud.mongodb.com, and configure some default settings in order to spin a new free cluster. We also get the option to select the cloud provider and region.

 

after creating the cluster and configuring credentials, we are all set as you can see I have created a new cluster in the AWS cloud, and the Collection is called "task" and it is a shared one so free no charges will apply. 

Next, let's initialize the Spring Boot application for that, we can go to https://start.spring.io/  or if you have a Spring Boot plugin in your IDE you can use that as well.

In the Spring initializer, I have added four dependencies. 

1. Spring Web:- For building RESTful APIs.
2. Spring Data MongoDB: -  It is a part of the Spring Data project, which provides integration with the MongoDB document database.
3. Spring Boot Actuator:- it is a sub-project of Spring Boot and is used for monitoring purposes.
4. Lombok:- For Java annotations. 

After this, We can generate the code and open it in your favorite IDE. I have written code for CRUD operations to test the API with MongoDB Atlas.

Let's see 1-2 examples.

• Create some content in MongoDB Atlast using Spring Boot API:
  
  
  
• Let's invoke the GET by ID endpoint
  
  
  
• GET ALL endpoint
  
  
  
• Rest of the operations you can check in the code but one more thing I wanted to show here is how the data is stored in the MongoDB Atlas, for that we can go to the cluster and click on Browse Collection 
  
  
  

There are other things that we can explore such as Realtime Monitoring, Enabling Data API which is available in MongoDB Atlas.

  

 That's it in this blog. Code Repo.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!