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If you use DevOps processes, automation and orchestration are king — which is why the Google Cloud cron service can be a great tool for managing your Google Compute Engine instances via Google App Engine code. This kind of automation can often involve multiple Google Cloud services, which is great for learning about them or running scheduled tasks that might need to touch multiple instances. Here are a few ideas on how to use the Google Cloud cron service:
1. Automated Snapshots
Since Google Compute Engine lets you take incremental snapshots of the attached disks, you can use the Google App Engine cron to take these snapshots on a daily or weekly basis. This lets you go back in time on any of your compute instances if you mess something up or have some systems fail. If you use Google’s Pub/Sub service, you can have the snapshots take place on all instances that are subscribed to that topic.
As a bonus, you can use a similar idea to manage old snapshots and deleting things you don’t need anymore. For example, schedule a Google Cloud cron to clean up snapshots three months after a server is decommissioned, or to migrate those snapshots to long-term storage.
2. Autoscaling a Kubernetes Cluster
With Google on the forefront of Kubernetes development, many GCP users make heavy use of GKE, the managed Kubernetes service. In order to save some money and make sure your containers aren’t running when they aren’t needed, you could set up a cron job to run at 5:00 p.m. each weekday to scale down your Kubernetes cluster to a size of 0. For maximum cost savings, you can just leave it off until you need it, then manually spin up the cluster, or you could use a second cron to spin you clusters up at 8:00 a.m. so it’s ready for the day.
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3. Send Weekly Reports
Is your boss hounding you for updates? Does your team need to know the status of the service? Is your finance group wondering how your GCP costs are trending for this week? Automate these reports using the Google Cloud cron service! You can gather the info needed and post these reports to a Pub/Sub topic, send them out directly, or display it on your internal dashboard or charting tool for mass consumption. These reports can be for various metrics or services, including Google Compute, Cloud SQL, or your billing information for your various projects.
Other Google Cloud Cron Ideas? Think Outside The Box!
Got any other ideas or existing uses to use the Google Cloud cron service to automate your Google Cloud environment? Let us know how you’re using it and why it helps you manage your cloud infrastructure.