Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is an ever-evolving cloud computing platform, and it's essential for DevOps teams to implement a patch management process to keep the services running on GCP up-to-date and secure. In this documentation, we'll cover how the our DevOps/SRE team implements patch management for various services running on GCP, including GKE, Google Cloud Storage (GCS), Google Cloud Functions, and public Helm charts, while ensuring high availability and minimizing downtime.
Terraform is used as an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool to manage resources in GCP. By using Terraform, our team are able to manage and maintain infrastructure in a version-controlled and repeatable manner. Terraform makes it easy to upgrade and patch services running on GCP, including GKE.
Our Devops/SRE Team leverages short-lived environments to test and upgrade services to a new version before applying it to the production environment. This approach allows teams to validate the new version's functionality and identify any potential issues before they reach production. GitHub is used as a source control system, which helps teams manage changes to the Terraform code and keep track of all versions.
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is a highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage system that is used for storing and retrieving data. Our DevOps/SRE team implements a lifecycle policy in GCS to move data between different storage classes, including nearline and coldline, depending on the data's access patterns. This way, we can keep the data secure and minimize costs by storing data in the most appropriate storage class.
For database services, our Devops/SRE Team uses Cloud SQL to manage the database instances. When upgrading the version of the database, our Devops/SRE Team follow the best practices to ensure high availability and minimize downtime. This includes creating a replica of the database and upgrading the replica first, and then promoting the replica to the primary after the upgrade is complete.
Google Cloud Functions is a serverless computing platform that is used to run code in response to events. Our Devops/SRE Team are responsible for patching and upgrading these functions to ensure they are running on the latest version.
Finally, our Devops/SRE Team uses public Helm charts to manage applications running on GKE. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, and it makes it easy to install, upgrade, and manage applications. DevOps teams ensure that they are using and testing the latest version of the charts, including any security patches and updates.
Overall, our team implements a comprehensive patch management process for services running on GCP, including GKE, GCS, Google Cloud Functions, and public Helm charts. By leveraging Terraform, short-lived environments, GitHub, and following best practices, DevOps teams can ensure high availability and minimize downtime while keeping their services secure and up-to-date.
Related Ticket: ITI-1984