I’ve begun exploring Vultr after the company announced a managed Kubernetes offering Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE). In my brief experience, it’s a decent platform and its CLI vultr-cli is mostly (!) good. The CLI has a limitation in that command output is text formatted and this makes it challenging to parse the output when scripting. NOTE The Vultr developers have a branch rewrite that includes a solution to this problem.

I was introduced to HackMD while working on an open-source project. It’s a collaborative editing tool for Markdown documents and there’s an API I wanted to be able to programmatically edit one of my documents with a daily update. The API is easy-to-use and my only challenge was futzing with escape characters in bash strips representing the document Markdown content. You’ll need an account with HackMD and an to Create API Token that I’ll refer to as TOKEN.

I’ve been on a roll building utilities this week. I developed a Service Health dashboard for my “thing”, a Prometheus Exporter for Fly.io and today, a Prometheus Exporter for Vultr. This is motivated by the fear that I will forget a deployed Cloud resource and incur a horrible bill. I’ve no written several Prometheus Exporters for cloud platforms: Prometheus Exporter for GCP Prometheus Exporter for Linode Prometheus Exporter for Fly.io Prometheus Exporter for Vultr Each of them monitors resource deployments and produces resource count metrics that can be scraped by Prometheus and alerted with Alertmanager.

Table of Contents Artifacts Pushover Caveat Cloud Monitoring Webhook Cloud Functions Cloud Run Artifacts GitHub: go-gcp-pushover-notificationchannel Image: ghcr.io/dazwilkin/go-gcp-pushover-notificationchannel:220515 Pushover Logging in to your Pushover account, you will be presented with a summary|dashboard page that includes Your User Key. Copy the value of this key into a variable called PUSHOVER_USER Create New Application|API Token Pushover API has a Pushing Messages method. The documentation describes the format of the HTTP Request. It must be a POST using TLS (https://) to https://api.

I have several Cloud Run services that I want to map to a domain. During development, I create a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project each day into which everything is deployed. This means that, every day, the Cloud Run services have newly non-inferable (to me) URLs. I thought this would be tedious to manage because: My DNS service isn’t programmable (I know!) Cloud Run services have non-inferable (by me) URLs i.

For my “thing”, I use Firestore to persist state. I like Firestore a lot and, having been around Google for almost (!) a decade, I much prefer it to Datastore. Firestore has a managed export|import service and I use this to backup Firestore collections|documents. I’d been doing backups manually (using gcloud) and decided today to take the plunge and use Cloud Scheduler for the first time. I’d been reluctant to do this until now because I’d assumed incorrectly that I’d need to write a wrapping service to invoke the export.

I’ve a day to catch up on blogging. I’m building a “thing” and getting this near to the finish line consumes my time and has meant that I’m not originating anything particularly new. However, there are a couple of tricks in my deployment process that may be of interest to others. I’ve been a long-term using of Google’s [Cloud Build] and like the simplicity (everything’s a container, alot!). Because I’m using GitHub repos, I’ve been using GitHub Actions to (re)build containers on pushes and GitHub Container registry (GHCR) to store the results.

Last year, I wrote about using Automatic Certs w/ Golang gRPC service on Compute Engine. That solution uses ACME with (the wonderful) Let’s Encrypt. Google is offering a private preview of Automate Public Certificates Lifecycle Management via RFC 8555 (ACME) and, because I’m using Google Cloud Platform extensively to build a “thing” and I think it would be useful to have a backup to Let’s Encrypt, I thought I’d give the solution a try.

Some time ago, I wrote about using Prometheus Service Discovery w/ Consul for Cloud Run and also Scraping metrics exposed by Google Cloud Run services that require authentication. Both solutions remain viable but they didn’t address another use case for Prometheus and Cloud Run services that I have with a “thing” that I’ve been building. In this scenario, I want to: Configure Prometheus to scrape Cloud Run service metrics Discover Cloud Run services dynamically Authenticate to Cloud Run using Firebase Auth ID tokens These requirements and – one other – present several challenges:

I needed to deploy a healthcheck-enabled gRPC TLS-enabled service. Fortunately, most (all?) of the SDKs include an implementation, e.g. Golang has grpc-go/health. I learned in my travels that: DigitalOcean [App] platform does not (link) work with TLS-based gRPC apps. Fly has a regression (link) that breaks gRPC So, I resorted to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Although Cloud Run would be well-suited to running the gRPC app, it uses a proxy|sidecar to provision a cert for the app and I wanted to be able to (easily use a custom domain) and give myself a somewhat general-purpose solution.