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Exercises and Projects

1 - Hands-on exercises​

Exercise 1: Initial setup​

Objective: Configure a GCP project for DevOps.

Tasks:

  1. Create a GCP project
  2. Enable the required APIs
  3. Create an Artifact Registry repository
  4. Configure the gcloud CLI
Solution
# Create the project
gcloud projects create mon-projet-devops \
    --name="Mon Projet DevOps"

# Set as active project
gcloud config set project mon-projet-devops

# Enable the APIs
gcloud services enable \
    cloudbuild.googleapis.com \
    artifactregistry.googleapis.com \
    run.googleapis.com \
    container.googleapis.com \
    monitoring.googleapis.com \
    logging.googleapis.com

# Create the Artifact Registry repo
gcloud artifacts repositories create images \
    --repository-format=docker \
    --location=europe-west1

# Configure Docker
gcloud auth configure-docker europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev

Exercise 2: Cloud Build pipeline​

Objective: Create a CI/CD pipeline for a Node.js application.

Solution
# cloudbuild.yaml
steps:
  - name: 'node:18'
    entrypoint: 'npm'
    args: ['ci']
  
  - name: 'node:18'
    entrypoint: 'npm'
    args: ['run', 'lint']
  
  - name: 'node:18'
    entrypoint: 'npm'
    args: ['test']
  
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args:
      - 'build'
      - '-t'
      - 'europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/app:$COMMIT_SHA'
      - '-t'
      - 'europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/app:latest'
      - '.'
  
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args:
      - 'push'
      - '--all-tags'
      - 'europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/app'

images:
  - 'europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/app:$COMMIT_SHA'
  - 'europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/app:latest'

options:
  machineType: 'E2_HIGHCPU_8'

Exercise 3: Cloud Run deployment​

Objective: Deploy an application to Cloud Run with traffic splitting.

Solution
# Deploy v1
gcloud run deploy my-app \
    --image=europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/mon-projet/images/app:v1 \
    --region=europe-west1 \
    --allow-unauthenticated \
    --tag=v1

# Deploy v2 without traffic
gcloud run deploy my-app \
    --image=europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/mon-projet/images/app:v2 \
    --region=europe-west1 \
    --no-traffic \
    --tag=v2

# Canary: 10% on v2
gcloud run services update-traffic my-app \
    --to-tags=v2=10,v1=90 \
    --region=europe-west1

# Promote v2 to 100%
gcloud run services update-traffic my-app \
    --to-tags=v2=100 \
    --region=europe-west1

Exercise 4: Monitoring and alerts​

Objective: Configure monitoring and alerts.

Solution
# Create an uptime check
gcloud monitoring uptime-checks create http app-health \
    --display-name="App Health Check" \
    --resource-type=uptime-url \
    --monitored-resource-labels=host=my-app-xxx.run.app \
    --path=/health \
    --check-interval=60s

# Create a notification channel (email)
gcloud alpha monitoring channels create \
    --display-name="Team Email" \
    --type=email \
    [email protected]

# Create an alert
gcloud alpha monitoring policies create \
    --display-name="High Error Rate" \
    --condition-display-name="Error rate > 1%" \
    --condition-filter='resource.type="cloud_run_revision" AND metric.type="run.googleapis.com/request_count" AND metric.labels.response_code_class="5xx"' \
    --condition-threshold-value=1 \
    --condition-threshold-comparison=COMPARISON_GT \
    --notification-channels=<channel-id>

2 - Complete project: Microservices Application​

Architecture​

Project structure​

my-microservices/
├── .cloudbuild/
│   ├── ci.yaml
│   └── cd.yaml
├── clouddeploy/
│   ├── delivery-pipeline.yaml
│   └── targets.yaml
├── services/
│   ├── frontend/
│   │   ├── Dockerfile
│   │   ├── package.json
│   │   └── kubernetes/
│   ├── api/
│   │   ├── Dockerfile
│   │   ├── package.json
│   │   └── kubernetes/
│   └── worker/
│       ├── Dockerfile
│       └── kubernetes/
├── skaffold.yaml
└── README.md

CI pipeline​

# .cloudbuild/ci.yaml
steps:
  # Build all services
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['build', '-t', '${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/frontend:$COMMIT_SHA', './services/frontend']
  
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['build', '-t', '${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/api:$COMMIT_SHA', './services/api']
  
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['build', '-t', '${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/worker:$COMMIT_SHA', './services/worker']
  
  # Push all
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['push', '${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/frontend:$COMMIT_SHA']
  
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['push', '${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/api:$COMMIT_SHA']
  
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['push', '${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/worker:$COMMIT_SHA']
  
  # Create release
  - name: 'gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk'
    entrypoint: 'gcloud'
    args:
      - 'deploy'
      - 'releases'
      - 'create'
      - 'release-$SHORT_SHA'
      - '--delivery-pipeline=microservices-pipeline'
      - '--region=${_REGION}'
      - '--images=frontend=${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/frontend:$COMMIT_SHA,api=${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/api:$COMMIT_SHA,worker=${_REGION}-docker.pkg.dev/$PROJECT_ID/images/worker:$COMMIT_SHA'

substitutions:
  _REGION: 'europe-west1'

options:
  machineType: 'E2_HIGHCPU_8'

Cloud Deploy Pipeline​

# clouddeploy/delivery-pipeline.yaml
apiVersion: deploy.cloud.google.com/v1
kind: DeliveryPipeline
metadata:
  name: microservices-pipeline
serialPipeline:
  stages:
    - targetId: dev
      profiles: [dev]
    - targetId: staging
      profiles: [staging]
    - targetId: production
      profiles: [production]
      strategy:
        canary:
          canaryDeployment:
            percentages: [25, 50, 75]
            verify: true

3 - Review quiz​

  1. What is the difference between Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy?

  2. When should you use GKE Autopilot vs Standard?

  3. How do you secure secrets in Cloud Run?

  4. What is Workload Identity?

  5. How do you configure a canary deployment on Cloud Run?

Answers

  1. Cloud Build runs the builds (CI). Cloud Deploy manages the delivery (CD) to environments.

  2. Autopilot: zero management, pay-per-pod. Standard: full control, GPU/TPU, customization.

  3. Use Secret Manager and mount the secrets with --set-secrets.

  4. A secure method to allow GKE pods to access GCP APIs without service account keys.

  5. Deploy with --no-traffic then use update-traffic to gradually increase the percentage.

4 - Google Cloud Certification​

Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer​

DomainWeight
Bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization17%
Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines24%
Applying SRE practices to a service23%
Implementing service monitoring strategies21%
Optimizing service performance15%

Resources​

Course summary​

Congratulations! You have completed the GCP DevOps course.

You now have a solid grasp of:

  • Cloud Source Repositories and triggers
  • Cloud Build for CI
  • Artifact Registry for artifacts
  • Cloud Deploy for CD
  • GKE and Cloud Run for execution
  • Cloud Monitoring and Logging

Next steps​

  • Practice with real projects
  • Take the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification
  • Explore advanced services (Cloud Functions, Anthos)

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