A year ago I looked at how to keep VM system clocks accurate to UTC. This post details another experiment, this time using just Google Compute Engine VMs.

This time, the experiment aims to prove that Virtual Machines running on Google Compute Engine (i.e. IaaS) can keep the system clock accurate to within 1ms of UTC. I ran a test against each of the operating systems that my company will be using most: RHEL 7 and Windows 2016.

This article provides a step-by-step description of how to get terraform up and running against a GCP project. It follows Google’s tutorial and gets to the point whereby a VM can be provisioned in GCE using terraform scripts. The code for this article is in a github repo.

I recently worked on a 3-month pilot project to investigate how we can move my firm’s applications into the cloud. For my part, I concentrated on deploying Windows .NET services and ASP.NET applications. This article documents the main things I learned, and describes key points and things to do when we move our applications onto the cloud.

tl;dr

• Application code doesn’t need to change too much, but the way it is deployed does.
• In the locked-down corporate environment, not much cloud-specific training is needed.
• A working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code and Configuration as Code is needed. For those who will be reviewing pull requests containing IaC / CaC changes, a deeper knowledge is needed.
• Even when IaC / CaC is used having a “sandpit” (where one can play with cloud tools manually) is important.

This is part 5 in a series of posts where I spike out a cloud microservice app on GCP. In this post I secure the endpoint for my app by configuring it to use SSL / TLS (HTTPS).

This is part 4 in a series of posts where I spike out a cloud microservice app on GCP. In this post I set up an Istio service mesh to run my app.