How to connect to Cloud SQL from Cloud Run (no, you don't need a VPC)

A minimal application architecture would compose of a database, and an application backend. Serverless database is still in its infancy, but thankfully container-based runtime is very much alive and doing well. On GCP, a serverless container-based runtime do exist, known as Cloud Run. Standard database access pattern Per standard security practices, you should not expose your database to public, this means you should use a proxy/tunnel or private network to reach your database....

February 10, 2024 · 3 min · Karn Wong

Things to watch out for GCP SSL with Cloudflare DNS

For our production workload, we deploy the workloads on Kubernetes, in which an ingress resource is created per each deployment. Resources in ingress are GCP Load Balancer and SSL Certificate. As for DNS, we use Cloudflare since it enables CDN without extra configurations on our part. A few months after the deployment went live initially, we were informed that the website couldn’t be accessed. Turns out GCP couldn’t renew the SSL Certificate (error FAILED_NOT_VISIBLE....

December 18, 2023 · 1 min · Karn Wong

Bare metal works, until it doesn't. Hello, cloud.

Background Ever wonder how websites (and everything in between) work? Chances are you can create a project running on your local machine. It works as you expected, but to let other people access it, you have to “deploy” it. For many years, to support a lot of request volumes you need to run your applications in a data center. These days this setup is known as on-premise. Architecture Let’s take a look at a simple e-commerce website architecture....

March 24, 2023 · 4 min · Karn Wong

Google Analytics v4 ingestion via BigQuery

Background You want to track who access your site, Google Analytics can do that. To see the data, you can use Google Analytics dashboard, the default settings is good enough for most use cases. But what if you have a lot of tracking data, and you want to streamline a way to analyze it? You could use Data Studio for this, so it’s cool for the moment. But what if you want to use Google Analytics data in conjunction with other data?...

March 19, 2023 · 7 min · Karn Wong