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GCP Attach Detach Disks

Google Cloud Platform just recently released a beta feature called detaching and attaching boot disks. Previously, boot disks were permanently attached to their VM instances. Now you have the ability to detach boot disk from your instance and attach it to another instance without deleting the original instance. You can also replace the boot disks for an instance rather than recreating the entire instance. I’ve tested it on my test account, and it works quite nicely.

I have 2 servers called blue-server and red-server. I’m detaching the disks on blue-server and attaching it to the red-server.

gcloud compute instances detach-disk blue-server --disk=blue-server-disk --zone us-central1-c
gcloud compute instances attach-disk cyan-server --disk=blue-server-disk --zone us-central1-c
gcloud compute instances detach-disk cyan-server --disk=blue-server-disk --zone us-central1-c
gcloud compute instances attach-disk blue-server --disk=blue-server-disk --zone us-central1-c

Results:

GCP: Attach and Detach Disks

This new GCP feature is still beta. There might be a few quirks here and there, but overall, it’s a must have feature if you are managing OS.

Create Image on GCP

Here’s the command to create an image from an existing VM instance. You can create an image from disks, snapshots, images or from a cloud storage file. You can use images you built to launch and restore VM instances, as well as create Instance Templates.

gcloud compute --project=your-project images create your-server --source-disk=your-server --source-disk-zone=us-central1-c

Take A GCP Snapshot

Here’s the gcloud command to create a snapshot of your GCP instance.

gcloud compute disks snapshot your-server \
--snapshot-names=your-server-180808 \
--project=your-project \
--zone=us-central1-c

Cloning A GCP Repo

Here are the steps on how to clone a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) repository. This is assuming you already installed Google Cloud SDK.

gcloud init
gcloud source repos clone name_of_repo --project=project_name
cd name_of_repo
git commit -a -m "your comment"
git push -u origin master

GKE On-Prem

How about running GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) on your own data center. Why would anyone do that while everyone else is moving to the cloud. Well, Google is creating a stepping stone to move enterprises to the cloud. What a better way than to build a bridge that will shorten the gap. GKE On-Prem service will include access to all GKE cloud features, including the ability to register, manage clusters and monitoring via a service called Stackdriver. GKE On-Prem will include a direct line to the GCP Marketplace, which has support for Kubernetes-based applications.

GCP Billing Issues

This is what happens when AI takes over billing issues. The element of leniency, fairness and humanity goes out the window. Such is the case when servers were automatically shut down by Google Cloud due to a billing issue. Services were shut down because of a credit card problem. The email sent by Google to the company even threatened to delete the project if the billing issue is not resolved in three days. Read article.

GitLab Moves to GCP

Gitlab is moving from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform mainly due to its integration with Google Kubernetes Engine. Gitlab believes Kubernetes is the future and makes their platform to massively scale as it grows. The move is scheduled on July 28. Gitlab plans to use their Geo product for the migration of Gitlab.com. For more, read the article.