Two primary attractions of cloud computing are autohealing and autoscaling. Individual cloud VM instances do not come equipped with either of these features, however; for that you need to master a higher-level abstraction, the Managed Instance Group. In this course, Building Scalable Compute Solutions with Managed Instance Groups, you will gain the ability to instantiate, scale, and actually use Managed Instance Groups on the Google Cloud Platform. First, you will learn what an instance template is, how it is created, and how it can be used to instantiate either individual instances or an instance group. Instance templates are the basic building blocks of infrastructure automation on the GCP, and can be thought of as blueprints from which a VM instance can be created. You can use an instance template along with a health check and an autoscaling policy to create a Managed Instance Group. In this way, the GCP ensures the uniformity of all instances in the MIG. This allows the service to implement perfect horizontal scaling, in which generic instances enter and leave the group over time. Next, you will discover how updates and rollbacks are performed, and how individual instances can be debugged in a Managed Instance Group. Finally, you will explore how to configure a Managed Instance Group as the scalable backend for a Load Balancer. The GCP has several load balancing options at different levels of the OSI network stack, and in this course we focus on wiring up an HTTP load balancer to the backend instance group. Load balancers have a lot of moving parts, so this configuration is fairly involved. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of Managed Instance Groups needed to build scalable compute backends that provide both autohealing and autoscaling on the GCP.
Author Name: Vitthal Srinivasan
Author Description:
Vitthal has spent a lot of his life studying – he holds Masters Degrees in Math and Electrical Engineering from Stanford, an MBA from INSEAD, and a Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering from Mumbai. He has also spent a lot of his life working – as a derivatives quant at Credit Suisse in New York, then as a quant trader, first with a hedge fund in Greenwich and then on his own, and finally at Google in Singapore and Flipkart in Bangalore. In all these roles, he has written a lot of code, and b… more

Table of Contents

• Course Overview
  2mins
• Instantiating GCE VMs from Instance Templates
  52mins
• Configuring and Using Managed Instance Groups
  43mins
• Load Balancing and Autoscaling with Managed Instance Groups
  27mins