VM Manager: Operate large Compute Engine fleets with ease | Hacker News Reader

VM Manager: Operate large Compute Engine fleets with ease

cloud.google.com

100 pointsalexrustic15 comments

So it looks similar to AWS Systems Manager, but only for Windows and Linux in GCP. In their Youtube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaA66WUaaM&feature=youtu.be they're saying however you're doing "patch compliance" whether it's orchestration or by-hand it is still essentially being done incrementally by hand possibly one package at a time. So instead of using Terraform/Ansible/Vagrant to connect to GCP you can use their VM manager to perform bulk updating of OS packages. Their VM manager relies on agent software to connect directly to your VM to issue system commands via your OS native console.

I just get some random hard to debug crash. Is this production ready?

[root@docker-test-image-1 ~]# sudo systemctl status google-osconfig-agent

...

Started Google OSConfig Agent. Jan 28 20:25:22 docker-test-image-1 OSConfigAgent[25491]: 2021-01-28T20:25:22.8732Z OSConfigAgent Info: OSConfig Agent (versi> Jan 28 20:25:26 docker-test-image-1 OSConfigAgent[25491]: 2021-01-28T20:25:26.2589Z OSConfigAgent Error inventory.go:57: pack> Jan 28 20:35:33 docker-test-image-1 OSConfigAgent[25491]: 2021-01-28T20:35:33.3380Z OSConfigAgent Error inventory.go:57: pack>

I can not find the use-cases this might answer, is this supposed to replace IaC tools such as ansible or Terraform? AFAIK using standard GCE instances and updating them or re-rovisioning them is a quite cheap operation, I'm not sure where this stands in the whole "pet vs cattle" spectrum. I could be missing something, I am genuinely curious about this new product.

VM Manager is three separate services, one of which is "OS config management", which is more akin to Ansible (or Puppet, Chef, etc), i.e. provisioning software on a system. The other two services look after themselves TBH.

The OS config mangement in practice is a daemon that polls for "guest policies" every 10 minutes. Their example policies will give you a good idea of what it does:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/os-config-management/c...

Or better still, the `google_os_config_guest_policies` terraform resource:

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/lat...

(Essentially it's pretty basic stuff: configuring package repos, installing packages, running scripts, and copying artefacts).

This is really nice. Many/most enterprises likely still deploy on VM's so this is likely a godsend to sysadmins/whoever has to manage large number of VMs.

A lot like AWS Systems Manager, it seems.

My only question is if this is getting an AWS-like key-value store tied into their KMS offering? The big value of AWS System Manager was actually just having a secure key-value store tied into AWS IAM auth.

Like the GCP Secrets Manager?

https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager

Is this intended only for VM's on GCP, or anywhere?

AWS took years to launch Cloud Shell, and now Google is catching up with System Manager equivalent. Fair cloud!

I wouldn't be hugely surprised to find out there's a Gartner points requirement for such features.

Underneath that magic quadrant graph that Gartner publish each year is a scoring system, x and y features are worth 1 point, w and z features are worth 3 points, etc. etc. Typically that's based on what other clouds are already doing, but in some places they attempt to push features that way based on what their market research indicates customers want.

Clouds know what they'll be evaluated on about a year before they're evaluated, so they know what features they need to build during the year. Evaluation time is coming up for clouds, so you should expect to see a bunch of features announced over the next few months :)

Aah, i cant trust google services anymore, sadly. More so if critical.

I even treat my own gmail account with resignation these days.

My Picasa, my rss, my google chat.

Am i wrong to have never touched these cloud services?

I prefer dedicated servers even over AWS, too.

Edit: spellink

Edit2: people downvoting me to hell .. i have to defend my internet points a bit here ..

How should i treat these google services if not with this nihilism? Amazon isn't killing products.

Ill admit to liking kube, but mostly because its open source and “out there” where no one can kill it. Google publishing stuff thats 100% in its control sends a shiver down my long-term-service thinking. Add “Fleets” to it and i get a sense of dread at the thought.

Yes you are so totally right because a huge company scrapped a b2c legacy acquired photo product you liked whilst merging it with another service, they are going to shut down their multi-billion dollar b2b cloud offering in a strategic growth market at any moment without warning. Thank you for pointing this out! And can I say how much I enjoy seeing this same comment repeated on every google cloud post.

There's valid concerns about Google Cloud support (or lack thereof), Google account shutdowns without notice/recourse and Google price increases (ie: maps, kubernetes). Google shutting down cloud given its massive revenue and likely many long term contracts with horrible penalty clauses isn't I feel a valid concern.

Amazon has killed many products/services over the years...

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