Introduction: What is Spring Cloud GCP (Google Cloud Platform)?
The Spring Cloud GCP is a tool that demonstrates how GCP and Spring Cloud Services can be used together. GCP support helps us to create a high-availability, fully scalable application. The Spring Cloud GCP project is a collaborative effort by the community. It brings together the best practices from both Google and open-source communities. The main focus of Spring Cloud GCP is microservice architectures on GCP. Microservices are a paradigm for developing and deploying highly-scalable software systems. Where each service runs in its own process and can be handled separately.
How does Spring Cloud GCP work?
Spring Cloud GCP is a framework that provides cloud-based integration between your microservices, messaging platforms, and databases. It is developed on top of Google’s App Engine platform and helps you to develop applications with less effort. When we use Spring Cloud GCP framework, using a single interface to your application you can connect both on-premise and cloud-based services and also easily manage them. To achieve this, Spring Cloud GCP uses the Google App Engine Application Environment (GAEAE) which provides a simple RESTful interface for interacting with your data. The following diagram illustrates a typical architecture of Spring Cloud GCP:
It is worth to mention that Spring Cloud GCP uses the following Java libraries:
- Spring Cloud Stream (2.x)
- Spring Session (2.x)
- JDBC
- Spring Security 4.0 x.
GCP offers a unified development and management experience for integrating Spring applications on-premises and on the cloud with a common set of APIs. Spring Cloud GCP provides capabilities for deploying, managing, monitoring, scaling, and scaling down your services in the cloud. Additionally you can make use of GCP Pub/Sub service if you have requirements for messaging or your application is event-driven.
What are the Advantages of Using Spring Cloud GCP?
- The main advantage of using the Spring Cloud GCP is that it is a complete cloud solution in and of itself.
- In addition, there are many features that have been built directly into the platform such as global load balancing, anywhere/anytime notifications for deployments, automatic service discovery for microservices, automated rollback auditing, and much more.
- It’s also easy for you to make replicas on cloud, it will help your application with scenarios like disaster recovery.
- With effective load balancing you can serve certain regions with very latency.
- You can deploy your application in multiple regions very easily.
- Helps you eliminate the cost of purchasing the physical hardware (the big initial investment). Using GCP you are basically renting the resources through resource pooling.
What are the Disadvantages of Using Spring Cloud GCP?
The disadvantages of using Spring Cloud GCP (Google Cloud Platform) are that:
- It is still in a beta release, the documentation on the project page is not very extensive for this platform. It means that the plugins for managing Cloud SQL are not available and still in development.
- Moreover not every feature is free in Google cloud, most of the features have some cost associated with them after a certain limit.
- In some cases, the cost of running your application on cloud may be more expensive than running them using dedicated data centers.
- In some cases deployment on cloud is not straightforward. You may need to spend a lot of money on hiring the suitable engineers for the migration. Even after cloud migration there is no surety that your whole app can get migrated to cloud. Most companies prefer to have a hybrid model (some applications on cloud and using data-centers for the other services).
How Can You Use Spring Cloud GCP to Your Advantage?
The following are a few ways you can use Google Cloud Platform to your advantage:
- Authenticating Users and Providing Access to Containers with Spring Cloud GCP while the tech stack is tricky, the porting of Spring Cloud projects shouldn’t be difficult. This can allow you to use Google APIs like authentication and billing for your application. In this case, a customer uses an authenticator (an access token) in order to authenticate with your application.
- The next step is to use the billing API in order to access either a Google Cloud Platform container or cloud services. For example, if you have a web app running under GCP, you might want to get the number of requests made by users per hour and charge them accordingly in order for your business model to work.
- It’s important that you understand how you are gonna use Google API: If your infrastructure can already be configured in a way that will allow easy use of GCP, then it might be better to choose Google Cloud Platform. If you are deciding between running on your own servers or on GCP, the most important thing to think about is what are the costs associated with each resource.
Conclusion:
- Spring Cloud GCP provides a way to integrate GCP with Spring application and makes developer’s journey easy by providing support with various dependencies.
- Curious to learn more about this awesome tool? please visit official documentation
- For more Spring Cloud GCP and other tech-blogs please visit Knoldus Blogs
