PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Welcome to "Get
Cooking in Cloud," where we share the best recipes
to apply in your Cloud kitchen.
I'm Priyanka Vergadia, and in this episode,
we will talk about two very unique businesses
and their website hosting challenges.
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My friend Christine is an amazing baker
and started this bakery called Cloudy Bakers, where
she sells her baked goods in her newly
rented store in California.
After a few weeks in business, she asked for some help.
She wanted to build an online presence for her business
to spread the word about her treats
and grow beyond California.
Now, it makes sense to start a website with a fixed menu
to be displayed, along with her contact information
and some other details.
So that's what we did.
We needed to create a static website
with her branding, logo, and a beautiful picture of her very
tasty menu items.
In order to accomplish this, we started
by purchasing a domain called cloudybakers.com
on Google Domains.
Now, with this domain, we officially
have an online business name.
Since all we needed was to establish an online presence
and make sure that people know what Cloudy Bakers sells,
we decided to use Google Cloud Storage
to host the static website.
We created a Cloud Storage bucket
called www.cloudybakers.com and uploaded
all the HTML, JavaScript, and images, like the menu
and the logos, in it.
Once done, we made sure that all the files in the bucket
are publicly accessible, so the users can see the website.
This was great, but after about six months,
Christine called me again.
Her business had grown, and she was
getting more and more interest in her baked goods.
And her customers were now looking for options
to purchase online.
But she had to work with some constraints.
She had very limited help from a developer
to update the site to take online orders.
She was anticipating a higher volume of cookie orders
in December because, holidays.
And budget was also tight.
Given these challenges, she had to pick an option
to host the site such that she does not
have to worry about infrastructure needs
if the products got popular and traffic grew from a few users
to thousands of users.
So I recommended that she use managed compute platform Cloud
Run.
Since Cloud Run is serverless, it
abstracts away all the infrastructure management
so she could focus on what matters most, selling
more of her amazing cookies.
We pointed this newly created website to the domain name,
and Cloudy Bakers could now take online orders.
This recipe provided them a wide range
of features that made scalability,
load balancing, logging, monitoring, and security much
easier than if she had to build and manage
this website herself.
Cloud Run also provided her business the flexibility
to code in any programming language,
because the application is deployed as a container,
and Google seamlessly launches and scales
the application as needed.
Christine's business is off to a great start,
and she's very happy that she chose
Cloud Run to host the website so she could focus
all her attention on baking.
If you would like to learn how to build websites on Cloud Run,
we've got a video for that.
Check it out.
Now, let's consider XpressFood.
XpressFood is an online grocery shopping platform.
They're a market leader and have been around for a long time.
They currently host their website on premise
and are looking to move to cloud.
The CEO is convinced that this move
will lead to benefits in total cost of ownership,
operational expenditures, and allow the teams to focus
on their core business.
XpressFood has a complex website with varying server
configurations with specific memory, SSD, and GPU
requirements.
Given this specificity, it was clear
that they needed more options and control than a managed
platform could offer.
So I proposed a lift-and-shift approach using Compute Engine.
This recipe was apt for XpressFood,
because the teams had complete control of the system
and flexibility.
They also had familiarity with the virtual machine
configurations from on-premise world
and can continue to apply the concepts in Google Cloud
Platform without having to learn new concepts.
They migrated the web server, application server,
the database, to Google Cloud by creating Google Compute Engine
instances and mapping the memory and CPU of the currently
used on-premise instances.
XpressFood sees variable traffic patterns
depending on the seasons and the times of the day.
So we also applied autoscaling policies in conjunction
with load balancing by setting up an autoscaler
that scales based on load on the instances.
The CEO is happy that moving to cloud
led to reduced operational expenses
as a result of autoscaling, and the engineering team
is happy that they don't have to capacity plan for the purchase
of new hardware, a win-win situation for the XpressFood
team.
But still, there was a challenge they were facing.
Their feature launch speed was really slow.
Digging further, we found that they had large development
teams working on different features, but most of them
were not able to launch due to dependencies on each other.
Since the website was a huge monolith,
the feature rollouts had to be combined together.
That's just not efficient, especially
for the teams and features that are small, quick updates.
To solve this issue, I recommended
that XpressFood create microservices
so that teams can work on individual services,
removing the rollout dependencies on each other.
Breaking the monolith into different services
to componentize is best achieved through containerization.
So the next logical move for XpressFood
was to containerize the services of the web application.
This didn't just increase the speed
with which they were able to innovate,
but also provided portability and manageability.
If you're looking to use GKE to deploy your web application,
follow the link in the description below.
All right.
So let's summarize what we learned today.
We saw how Cloudy Bakers was able to establish
their online presence by creating a static website
on Google Cloud Storage, and then utilized
Cloud Run to expand their online presence with minimum resources
and effort.
We also learned how XpressFood used Google Compute
Engine to host their existing legacy on-premise website
on Google Cloud in the least amount of effort possible,
and eventually containerized the website following
the microservices architectural principles,
leading to rapid deployment and efficiency.
That's all for today on "Get Cooking in Cloud."
Here's hoping you can whip up something great.
Join us in the next episode, where
we will cook a new dish, disaster recovery on Google
Cloud.
If you would like to share your feedback on this series,
write a comment below or tweet us.
And if you would like to see more such content,
then don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel.
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