« Previous 1 2 3
Building Big Iron in the Cloud with Google Compute Engine
Iron Ore
Adding Storage
GCE has two kinds of storage: scratch disks and persistent disks. When you create a GCE instance, for example, you get a default disk of 10GB. This "scratch space" storage shouldn't be used to save mission critical data and can't be used to share data; instead, you should use a persistent disk.
A scratch disk is tied to the virtual instance itself and will not be as performant as persistent storage with Google Cloud. Remember, scratch storage isn't where you store or back up critical data – unless you like to lose data – because you might delete and recreate instances.
A persistent disk is separate from any instance and exists outside your virtual instances. You can think of these as your virtual enterprise cloud storage that you create, format, and mount to make available to your instances.Adding a persistent disk can be done both with gsutil and from the web GUI. For the sake of space and to get you up and running quickly, I will use the quickest method: the web console. Again, those familiar with almost any other cloud provider will feel right at home with the ease of use and power of the Google Cloud Platform.
Adding persistent storage is as easy as going to the Google Cloud Console and navigating to Compute Engine | Disks and then New Disk (Figure 4). Fill in a name for this disk and any related description; then, pick a zone (same zone as you specified before or it will not work) and select a source type of None (blank disk) .
Finally, select a size for the new persistent disk and click Create , then click on your instance and scroll down to the Disks section. Select attach and add the disk you just created with read/write (Figure 5). Now you should SSH into your instances and look at your current disks (Listing 2):
$gcutil ssh gcerocks-instance-1 joe@gcerocks-instance-1:~$ sudo fdisk -l
Listing 2
Listing Disks
01 Disk /dev/sda: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes 02 4 heads, 32 sectors/track, 163840 cylinders, total 20971520 sectors 03 Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes 04 Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes 05 I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes 06 Disk identifier: 0x0001e258 07 08 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System 09 /dev/sda1 2048 20971519 10484736 83 Linux 10 11 Disk /dev/sdb: 536.9 GB, 536870912000 bytes 12 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 65270 cylinders, total 1048576000 sectors 13 Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes 14 Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes 15 I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes 16 Disk identifier: 0x00000000 17 18 Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
Next you need to add a partition table, format it, make a mount point (here, /mnt/pdisk
), and mount the new disk:
joe@gcerocks-instance-1:~$fdisk /dev/sdb joe@gcerocks-instance-1:~$mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb joe@gcerocks-instance-1:~$mkdir /mnt/pdisk joe@gcerocks-instance-1:~$mount /dev/sdb /mnt/pdisk
Finally, you can see your new disk available in its almost 500GB of glory (Listing 3).
Listing 3
Viewing a Disk
01 joe@gcerocks-instance-1:~$ df -hl 02 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on 03 rootfs 9.9G 722M 8.7G 8% / 04 udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev 05 tmpfs 171M 108K 171M 1% /run 06 /dev/disk/by-uuid/a3864f53-b3b7-4a6d-9a27-548305aa6594 9.9G 722M 8.7G 8% / 07 tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock 08 tmpfs 342M 0 342M 0% /run/shm 09 /dev/sdb 493G 198M 467G 1% /mnt/pdisk
Finale
Now that you have created an instance, set up Cloud SDK, and added some storage, you're on your way. I hope you've enjoyed this quick overview of the Google Compute Engine and that I've provided some introductory insights into this compelling platform. With the beginnings of your cloud infrastructure set up, you are primed to build whatever you like with this powerful IaaS cloud option, so have some fun in the cloud playground.
Infos
- Google Cloud Platform: https://cloud.google.com/products/
- CoreOS, FreeBSD, and SELinux can be imported via instructions at https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/operating-systems
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, and Windows are commercially supported operating systems, so they are offered as paid options: https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/operating-systems
- Google Compute Engine: https://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine/
- Google Developer Console: http://cloud.google.com/console
- Cygwin: http://cygwin.com/
- gcutil: https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/gcutil/
- gcloud: https://developers.google.com/cloud/sdk/gcloud
- Gcutil command reference: https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/gcutil/reference/
- Google Cloud SDK: https://developers.google.com/cloud/sdk/
« Previous 1 2 3
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)