Raw notes from Cloud Debugging with Patrick Flynn. Java Tools Tech Lead on Java Cloud Platform.

Picture from good old days, 2003. Hardware was very manual. Purchase orders, procurement, six months later. Cork board to separate motherboards.

Tooling was also not good back then.

Did show of hands about who is doing deployments by hand.

Today, we can provision in a matter of seconds. Great network infrastructure, great physical security, but if you are deploying manually, you are still not getting all the benefits.

Asserts that spring boot is the platform of choice in the community right now. Deployed as jars, not wars. Demo. Takes DataStore, a google cloud platform feature. Puts a value to the data store and displays it.

Mutates the demo to add translation. It is a available as a maven dependency in maven central. Had to look up the javadoc, out of the IDE. Restarted spring boot because of dependency added. Added language detection iteratively.

Google cloud tools for intellij has support for a number of services. Plugged these heavily. Cloud source repositories, for example.

App Engine Flex. Create Deployment Configuration: Went through lots of the fields in this dialog. Points: Good maven support. Need an appengine-web.xml. On build, this actually orchestrates a Docker build. The system looks at the project type and chooses the right Docker image to run it. This is a bit slower than App Engine Standard.

Mentioned the vendor lock in concern. App Engine Flex is not a walled garden. It allows running arbitrary APIs. Because it depends on Docker, you can take your output to any other cloud.

Google built Borg as a container running service. Kubernetes was informed by the design of Borg. How do you run the Spring Boot demo on Kubernetes? He went into the gcloud CLI and created a bunch of stuff to run it. This is entirely separate from App Engine Flex.

Showed how the debugger gets enabled: Adding the cloud debugger agent into the Dockerfile. The service name and the project file are included in the dockerfile so the debugger knows about it.

Supports GitHub integration.

Demo used the spotify Docker Maven Plugin. Need to include source-context.json and source-contexts.json. Demo also includes a docker push to the container registry for the google cloud project. Did the mvn deploy from the cloud platform machine.

Additional kubernetes steps: Expose load balancer.

Showed lots of mutations of the config on kubernetes and App Engine Flex. Showed how easy traffic splitting, canary testing, and versioning works.

Used Apache Bench to generate load.

With no time left, he finally got to the debugging. Bug: reporting wrong user agent. Shows how in Intellij you can attach to running instances. It syncs the source to what is actually running in the cloud. This works because the agent captures what the breakpoints are, captures the sample at the time when it is hit. It is not interactive debugging. You can't step. But it's still better than nothing.