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How do you eat an elephant? Google SREs talk digital transformation

Today, everything from payroll software to specialized machine-learning systems is available “as a service” in the cloud, addressing a vast range of needs across businesses, enabling rapid growth and scale while allowing a business to focus on its core competencies.But moving to the cloud can generate tension, which is inevitably challenging for everyone involved—especially if that transformation creates “winners” and “losers” or frames individuals as “old” or “new.” The good news; however, is that a cloud transformation doesn’t have to be this way.As Google Cloud has grown, so too has the team of Googlers who build and support the platform, and many of us have sat in the same seat as our customers. We’ve experienced firsthand how empowering it can be to shape the future of an organization, help one another grow, as well as unlock the business opportunities that a transformation provides. Our own personal experiences, and those of our peers, have led us to conclude one thing we know to be true for every company – the story of digital transformation is a human story—one that involves as much cultural transformation as technological transformation. It’s with this realization we have identified the deeper factors behind a successful transformation. That’s why we recently published a guide, reflecting on the nature of these changes and how you can take action in your own organization to drive a migration to the cloud. Posing challenging questions helps you reflect on your own organization’s journey and the unique path you will need to take to lead to meaningful change. We wrote this guide to share key tenets that underpin the change philosophy you need to instill in your own organization. In A Practical Guide to Moving to Cloud, we present the following calls to action:Understand who in the organization you need to enlist to move to cloud.Create a psychologically safe culture in which you can grow together.Define clear objectives for your organization. Document measurable steps towards these goals and understand that each step must, in and of itself, deliver value.Review your existing organizational behaviors and set principles/policies which influence and direct every future decision related to your transformation.Use your new culture to refine how decisions are made, and provide meaningful autonomy across the organization.Build structures that empower practitioners to share best practices and solve common problems. Use these structures to empower your peers.Build guardrails into your cloud platform that support transformation, at pace, without negatively impacting others. Support safe experimentation.Understand what types of cloud platforms are the best fit for your business needs and determine your multi-cloud strategy in anticipation of your evolving business needs (e.g. acquisitions, new revenue streams, competitive responses).Recognize that everything is now software, and understand what this means for your existing IT infrastructure functions.Don’t be afraid to revisit existing, hallowed, security policies. Making them fit-for-purpose is crucial.Continuously measure and apply your new policies through software.Be bold; build a new way of operating your business products with a customer-centric perspective. Love your developers.At Google Cloud, we’re here to help you craft the right migration for you and your business. A Practical Guide to Moving to Cloud is available as a free download. You can also learn more about our data center migration solutions or sign up for a free migration cost assessment. Let’s get migrating! Visit sre.google to learn more about SRE and industry-leading practices for service reliability.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Cloud Bigtable + Cloud Memorystore: faster together

TLDR: Improve your application’s performance by using Memcached for frequently queried data like this:Databases are designed for specific schemas, queries, and throughput, but if you have data that gets queried more frequently for a period of time, you may want to reduce the load on your database by introducing a cache layer. In this post, we’ll look at the horizontally scalable Google Cloud Bigtable, which is great for high-throughput reads and writes. Performance can be optimized by ensuring rows are queried somewhat uniformly across the database. If we introduce a cache for more frequently queried rows, we speed up our application in two ways: we are reducing the load on hotspotted rows and speeding up responses by regionally colocating the cache and computing. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data, and I’m going to use the scalable, fully managed Memorystore for Memcached, since it is well integrated with the Google Cloud ecosystem.SetupCreate a new Google Cloud project or use an existing project and database of your choice. The examples here will show Cloud Bigtable, but Spanner or Firestore would be good options too.I’ll provide gcloud commands for most of the steps, but you can do most of this in the Google Cloud Console if you prefer.Create a Cloud Bigtable instance and a table with one row using these commands:cbt createinstance bt-cache “Bigtable with cache” bt-cache-c1 us-central1-b 1 SSD &&  cbt -instance=bt-cache createtable mobile-time-series “families=stats_summary” &&  cbt -instance=bt-cache set mobile-time-series phone#4c410523#20190501 stats_summary:os_build=PQ2A.190405.003 stats_summary:os_name=android &&  cbt -instance=bt-cache read mobile-time-seriesThe codeThe generic logic for a cache can be defined in the following steps: Pick a row key to query.If row key is in cacheReturn the value.     3. OtherwiseLook up the row in Cloud Bigtable.Add the value to the cache with an expiration.Return the value.For Cloud Bigtable, your code might look like this (full code on GitHub):I chose to make the cache key be row_key:column_family:column_qualifier to easily access column values. Here are some potential cache key/value pairs you could use:rowkey: encoded rowstart_row_key-end_row_key: array of encoded rowsSQL queries: resultsrow prefix: array of encoded rowsWhen creating your cache, determine the setup based on your use case. Note that Bigtable rowkeys have a size limit of 4KB, whereas Memcached keys have a size limit of 250 bytes, so your rowkey could potentially be too large.Create a Memorystore for Memcached instanceI’ll create a Memorystore for Memcached instance, but you can install and run a local Memcached instance to try this out or for testing. These steps can be done with the Memorystore Cloud Console if you prefer.1. Enable the Memorystore for Memcached API.2. Create a Memorystore for Memcached instance with the smallest size on the default network. Use a region that is appropriate for your application.3. Get the Memcached instance details and get the discoveryEndpoint IP address (you may have to wait a few minutes for the instance to finish creation).Set up machine within networkWe need to create a place to run code on the same network as our Memcached instance. You can use a serverless option such as Cloud Functions, but a Compute VM requires less configuration.Create a compute instance on the default network with enabled API scopes for Cloud Bigtable data. Note that the zone must be in the same region as your Memcached instance.2. SSH into your new VM.Optionally connect to Memcached via TelnetThe Memorystore for Memcached documentation contains more information about this process, but you can just run the commands below to set and get a value in the cache. Run the codeNow we are ready to put our code on the machine. You can clone the repo directly onto the VM and run it from there. If you want to customize the code, check out my article on rsyncing code to Compute Engine or use the gcloud scp command to copy your code from your local machine to your VM.2. Install maven3. Set environment variables for your configuration.4. Run the program once to get the value from the database, then run it again and you’ll see that the value is fetched from the cache.CleanupIf you followed along with this blog post, delete your VM, Cloud Bigtable Instance, and Memcached instance with these commands to prevent getting billed for resources:Next steps Now you should understand the core concepts for putting a cache layer in front of your database and can integrate it into your existing application. Head to the Google Cloud console where you can try this with Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Memorystore.Related ArticleGo faster and cheaper with Memorystore for Memcached, now GALearn about fully managed Memorystore for Memcached, which is compatible with open-source Memcached protocol and can save database costs …Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform