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.

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.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around with Akri, a Microsoft (DeisLabs) project for building a connected edge with Kubernetes. Kubernetes, IoT, Rust (and Golang) make this all compelling to me. Initially, I deployed an Akri End-to-End to MicroK8s on Google Compute Engine (link) and Digital Ocean (link). But I was interested to create me own example and so have proposed a very (!) simple HTTP-based protocol.

I was very interested to read about Microsoft’s DeisLab’s latest (rust-based) Kubernetes project: akri. If I understand it correctly, it provides a mechanism to make any (IoT) device accessible to containers running within a cluster. I need to spend more time playing around with it so that I can fully understand it. I had some problems getting the End-to-End demo running on Google Compute Engine (and then I tried DigitalOcean droplet) instances.

The prolific Alex Ellis has a new project, Inlets. Here’s a quick tutorial using Google Compute Platform’s (GCP) Compute Engine (GCE). NB I’m using one of Google’s “Always free” f1-micro instances but you may still pay for network *gress and storage Assumptions I’m assuming you’ve a Google account, have used GCP and have a billing account established, i.e. the following returns at least one billing account: gcloud beta billing accounts list If you’ve only one billing account and it’s the one you wish to use, then you can:

Earlier this week I discussed a Linode Prometheus Exporter. I added metrics for Digital Ocean’s Managed Kubernetes service to @metalmatze’s Digital Ocean Exporter. This left, metrics for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) which has, for many years, been my primary cloud platform. So, today I wrote Prometheus Exporter for Google Cloud Platform. All 3 of these exporters follow the template laid down by @metalmatze and, because each of these services has a well-written Golang SDK, it’s straightforward to implement an exporter for each of them.