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GCP Manually Move Instance

Here’s how to move a VM instance from one zone to another. Moving an instance will involve destroying the instance from the source zone, and then recreating a replacement instance in the destination zone. To make the move easier, we will use a machine image to recreate the instance. We will also take advantage of the compute and IP address reservations to guarantee that we use the same IP address machine type. Some large machine types are hard to come by.

Get a list of compute and IP reservations.

gcloud compute addresses list
gcloud compute reservations list

Make reservations.

gcloud compute addresses create centos-ip-reservation --addresses 10.128.15.216 --region us-central1 --subnet default
gcloud compute reservations create centos-us-central1-b --machine-type=n1-standard-1 --vm-count=1 --zone us-central1-b

Create a machine image.

gcloud compute instances stop centos
gcloud beta compute machine-images create centos-image-00 --source-instance centos

Delete original instance.

gcloud compute instances delete centos

Create an instance from image in the new zone. Use the compute and ip reservations previously made.

gcloud beta compute instances create centos \
--no-address \
--private-network-ip 10.128.15.216 \
--source-machine-image=centos-image-00 \
--subnet=https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/airy-totality-151318/regions/us-central1/subnetworks/default \
--machine-type=n1-standard-1 \
--reservation-affinity=any \
--reservation=centos-us-central1-b \
--zone=us-central1-b

Finally, clean it up once you are done.

gcloud compute instances delete centos --zone us-central1-b
gcloud compute addresses delete centos-ip-reservation 
gcloud compute reservations delete centos-us-central1-b --zone us-central1-b
gcloud beta compute machine-images delete centos-image-00

Top Shift i

When you run top on Linux with multiple processors, you can have processes with percentages higher than 100%. On a 4 core system, you can have a process that can run as high as 400%. To view it differently, press “shift i” while top is running. This will toggle the Irix mode to off. Pressing it again will turn it on. When the Irix mode is off, it will only show percentages divided by a total number of CPUs. This way, you get a true percentage of a process in a multiple core system.

Pressing 1 interestingly shows the breakdown of all CPUs.

AWS Create Backup Plan

After you created a backup vault, it’s time to create a backup plan. Here are a few examples.

aws backup create-backup-plan \
--cli-input-json file://backup-plan.json \
--profile default \
--region us-east-1

File: backup-plan.json

{
    "BackupPlan": {
        "BackupPlanName": "efs-0123",
        "Rules": [
            {
                "RuleName": "efs-0123",
                "TargetBackupVaultName": "efs-vault",
                "ScheduleExpression": "cron(0 0 ? * * *)",
                "StartWindowMinutes": 60,
                "CompletionWindowMinutes": 10080,
                "Lifecycle": {
                    "DeleteAfterDays": 7
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}

Finally, create a backup selection.

aws backup create-backup-selection \
--backup-plan-id xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx \
--cli-input-json file://backup-selection.json \
--profile poc \
--region us-east-1

File: backup-selection.json

{
    "BackupSelection": {
	"SelectionName": "efs-0123",
        "IamRoleArn": "arn:aws:iam::xxxxxxxxxxxx:role/service-role/AWSBackupDefaultServiceRole",
        "Resources": [],
        "ListOfTags": [
            {
                "ConditionType": "STRINGEQUALS",
                "ConditionKey": "aws-backup",
                "ConditionValue": "efs-0123"
            }
        ]
    }
}