Firstly I want to shout out to Doug Mahugh and his article which inspired this one. All I have done is implement his solution in Powershell so I can include it as part of a startup script for immutable VMs.
I won’t cover too much of what Doug covered but will quote his opening paragraph about why we use the proxy:
The Cloud SQL proxy provides fast, secure, encrypted connections to Cloud SQL database instances, without any need to manage allowed IP addresses or SSL/TLS configuration details. It’s a small self-contained executable that you can download for free, and it…
Introduction
Whilst I am a huge fan of short lived, immutable VMs with system state turned over to managed services like Cloud SQL, sometimes this simply isn’t practical or possible.
In these situations we are often left with long running, stateful instances that require the same sort of maintenance as ‘traditional’ infrastructure. But how do we manage these without the pain and ancillary infrastructure this often requires.
Recently I have been working with a client that has a stateful .NET application that runs on top of Windows Server 2016 GCE Instances. …
Deploying Packer in GCP to build Windows Images using Cloud Scheduler and Cloud Build with Terraform
When recently working on a customer environment I was looking at ways to improve the startup time of their Windows Application servers. Their sophisticated Powershell startup script was taking about 15–20 minutes to execute fully and involved installing IIS, Azure DevOps & Stackdriver agents and the specialist application software. It was fairly clear to me that time could be saved by packing at least some of these elements into a base image. This then led me to consider deploying Packer on GCP. …
Alistair Grew
I am a GCP Platform Engineer based in the UK. Thoughts here are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer.
