To ensure scalability and reliability when building an application on GCP, it is important to leverage the scalable and highly available cloud infrastructure services that GCP provides. Some key aspects to consider include:
Compute Engine – For compute resources, use preemptible or regular VM instances on Compute Engine. Make sure to use managed instance groups for auto-scaling and high availability. Instance groups allow easy addition and removal of VM instances to dynamically scale based on metrics like CPU usage, requests per second etc. They also provide auto-healing where if one VM fails, a new one is automatically spawned to replace it. Multiple zones can be used for redundancy.
App Engine – For stateless frontend services, App Engine provides a highly scalable managed environment where instances are automatically scaled based on demand. Traffic is load balanced across instances. The flexible environment even allows custom runtimes. Automaticscaling ensures the optimal number of instances are running based on metrics.
Cloud Functions – For event-driven workloads, use serverless Cloud Functions that run code in response to events. Functions are triggered by events and need no servers to manage. Automatically scales to zero when not in use. Ideal for short tasks like API calls, data processing etc.
Load Balancing – For distributing traffic across application backends, use Cloud Load Balancing which intelligently distributes incoming requests across backend instances based on load. It supports traffic management features like SSL proxying, HTTP(S) Load Balancing etc. Configure health checks to detect unhealthy instances and redirect traffic only to healthy ones.
Databases – For relational and non-relational data storage, use managed database services like Cloud SQL for MySQL/PostgreSQL, Cloud Spanner for global scalability, Cloud Bigtable for huge amounts of mutable and immutable structured data etc. All provide high availability, automatic scaling and failover.
Cloud Storage – Use Cloud Storage for serving website content, application assets and user uploads. Provides high durability, availability, scalability and security. Leverage features like near instant object uploads and downloads, versioning, lifecycle management etc.
CDN – Use Cloud CDN for caching and accelerated content delivery to end users. Configure caching rules to cache static assets at edge POPs for fast access from anywhere. Integrate with Cloud Storage, Load Balancing etc.
Container Engine – For containerized microservices architectures, leverage Kubernetes Engine to manage container clusters across zones/regions. Supports auto-scaling of node pools, self-healing, auto-upgrades etc. Integrates with other GCP services seamlessly.
Monitoring – Setup Stackdriver Monitoring to collect metrics, traces, and logs from GCP resources and applications. Define alerts on metrics to detect issues. Leverage dashboards for visibility into performance and health of applications and infrastructure.
Logging – Use Stackdriver Logging to centrally collect, export and analyze logs from GCP as well as application systems. Filter logs, save to Cloud Storage for long term retention and analysis.
Error Reporting – Integrate Error Reporting to automatically collect crash reports and exceptions from applications. Detect and fix issues quickly based on stack traces and crash reports.
IAM – For identity and access management, leverage IAM to control and audit access at fine-grained resource level through roles and policies. Enforce least privilege principle to ensure security.
Networking – Use VPC networking and subnets for isolating and connecting resources. Leverage features like static IPs, internal/external load balancing, firewall rules etc. to allow/restrict traffic.
This covers some of the key aspects of leveraging various managed cloud infrastructure services on GCP to build scalable and reliable applications. Implementing best practices for auto-scaling, redundancy, metrics-based scaling, request routing, logging/monitoring, identity management etc helps build resilient applications able to handle increased usage reliably over time. Google Cloud’s deep expertise in infrastructure, sophisticated services ecosystem and global infrastructure deliver an unmatched foundation for your scalable and highly available applications.