google.cloud VS Ansible

If you're talking general cloud services, Google still does plenty of that. Stadia was being turned into a specific streaming thing that's now also dead, but that's separate from the rest of their cloud stuff.

Cloud Services: Cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offer edge computing services that make it easier to deploy and manage edge computing devices. These services provide tools and platforms that simplify edge computing development and deployment, reducing the time and cost required to develop and deploy edge computing solutions.

These instruction will walk you through using Google Cloud "Free Tier" (https://cloud.google.com) as your VPS hosting provider. They are rated highly, with a very simple and slick interface. Although we'll be using the Free Tier, be warned that you will need to provide valid credit card information. (Of course, if you have a strong reason to use another provider, then by all means do so, but be sure to choose Ubuntu Server 20.04)

PAR 7 is one of the data camps Interxion has in France, and at the same time the newest. PAR7 is also known for its multiple collaboration with the largest cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

If you haven't been living under a rock, you've probably heard of AWS. It is an abbreviation for Amazon Web Services. AWS (by Amazon) offers a wide range of cloud computing services, such as computing, storage, database, analytics, machine learning, networking, mobile, developer tools, security, and enterprise applications. for all of your requirements, eliminating the need for you to set up your own servers. It provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure that can be tailored to each user's unique requirements, and it is widely regarded as one of the leading cloud platforms available today. Google Cloud (by Google) and Azure (by Microsoft) are both major competitors to AWS.

https://cloud.google.com/docs/overview

Netlify and Vercel are multi-cloud platforms, meaning they equally employ GCP and AWS for their infrastructure.

1) Create your Google account. If you're using a CC/VCC with a name set, I'd recommend you fill the Name and Surname fields with the ones on the CC. 2) Proceed to https://cloud.google.com and sign up for the 365 day trial. 3) Use your CC/VCC to set up the trial. No charges to your CC/VCC will be made. 4) Create a new VPS in Compute Engine => VM Instances. 5) Done! You now have a free VPS. You can set any configuration and location you'd like. Can be used again only when the old account's trial expires.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.