As I contemplate moving my “thing” into production, I’m anticipating aspects of the application that need maintenance and how this can be automated.

I’d been negligent in the maintenance of some of my container images.

I’m using mostly Go and some Rust as the basis of static(ally-compiled) binaries that run in these containers but not every container has a base image of scratch. scratch is the only base image that doesn’t change and thus the only base image that doesn’t require that container images buit FROM it, be maintained.

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. I know that Google provides analogs for GitHub repos and (forces me to use) Artifact Registry (to deploy my Cloud Run services) but even though I dislike GitHub Actions, it’s really easy to do everything in one place.

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. You’ll need to sign-up for the private preview, for what follows to work.

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.