Today I’m open sourcing runsd, an unofficial DNS service discovery and authentication layer I’ve built for Cloud Run to make microservices networking easier.

If you’ve used Kubernetes or Docker Swarm to run microservices, then you are probably familiar with the concept of DNS service discovery. This lets you call another service as easy as connecting to http://hello. Your request will be routed to a container running the service named hello even if it’s on another machine on your cluster.¹

However, Cloud Run currently does not offer a DNS service discovery experience and authenticating private services on Cloud Run requires you to make code changes which makes your services less portable (we’ll talk more about this soon). Read More →

Last month Google introduced GKE Autopilot. It’s a Kubernetes cluster that feels serverless: where you don’t see or manage machines, it auto-scales for you, it comes with some limitations, and you pay for what you use: per-Pod per-second (CPU/memory), instead of paying for machines.

In this article, I’ll do a hands-on review of GKE Autopilot works by poking at its nodes, API and run a 0-to-500 Pod autoscaling to see how well it scales from a user’s perspective.

1. Cluster creation
2. Poking at nodes
3. System Pods (kube-system)
4. limits vs request overriding behavior
5. Autoscaling under pressure: zero to 500 pods
6. Conclusion

Read More →

In this blog, I will show you how to use WebSockets support to build a fleet of serverless containers that make up a chatroom server that can scale a high number of concurrent connections (250,000 clients).

Read More →

I’ve published documentation on best pratices for running WebSockets applications such as chatrooms or game servers on Cloud Run’s stateless environment.

Cloud Run now supports WebSockets (and gRPC streams!) so I wrote a best practices guide for you to architect your streaming apps properly in a serverless world.https://t.co/MMJNhsbUVS pic.twitter.com/tu7msYtH0Z

— Ahmet Alp Balkan (@ahmetb) February 19, 2021

Read on cloud.google.com

Last year, I wrote a tutorial on deploying a serverless application to all Google Cloud regions, and route your users to the closer region using a load balancer with anycast IP. (I’ve since moved that article into our documentation). It was a 13+ step tutorial to get it working.

Naturally, I scratched the itch and released a Terraform module that makes this much easier. I posted it on Twitter, and it got over 200 likes, so I decided to write about how this works. In this article I’ll show you how you can automate deploying to “all regions”much easier using this new Terraform module. This repository contains all the code and examples I’ll talk here. Read More →

In this article, I’ll explain how to build OCI container images without using Docker by building the layers and image manifests programmatically using the go-containerregistry module. As an example, I’ll build a container image by adding some static website content on top of the nginx image and push it to a registry like gcr.io using a Go program. Read More →

I wrote an article on GCP blog announcing WebSockets, HTTP/2 and bi-directional streaming support for Cloud Run. Read on cloud.google.com

I’ve published an article on the Google Cloud Blog about the leader election and distributed consensus concepts, where they’re useful and why they are non-trivial problems. The artice shows you how to implement your own distributed lock easily by using Google Cloud Storage and the consistency guarantees it provides. Read on cloud.google.com