A recurring issue when working with Compute Engine is that newly created Instances have only 10GB of free space available. To take advantage of the full disk size you need to manually partition and resize it. This article shows one method of accomplishing this task. ...
Overview The Google Compute Engine core concepts video provides a great overview of the technology. Please take a moment to watch it. As the video shows, Compute Engine is defined by Resources, and each of these Resources is available through the Compute Engine API. You can access this API through the Google API Explorer or by installing the gcloud sdk. ...
fdisk is a wonderful little utility for managing partitions. I recently had to script a series of fdisk commands for resizing a partition and needed to extract the start sector from the existing disk to do so. I ended up using this combination of grep and awk to do the job. ...
Google Compute Engine allows you to make custom images from a running virtual machine. The documentation provides a sufficient example but is a little bit scattered. This article collects and presents all the steps necessary to create your own Compute Engine images that you can use as a base for virtual machines. ...
The Google Prediction API offers the power of Google’s machine learning algorithms over a RESTful API interface. The machine learning algorithms themselves are a complete black box. As a user you upload the training data and, once it has been analyzed, start classifying new observations based on the analysis of the training data. I recently spent some time investigating how to use the API to determine the sentiment of a tweet. This article collects my thoughts on the experience and a few recommendations for future work. ...
At VendAsta we have a few APIs that are backed by search documents built using the App Engine Search API. These APIs are queried using a search string entered in a text box. One way to improve the user experience of this text box is to offer the user suggestions of popular searches to use as their query. This article describes how to achieve this. ...
Asynchronous functions can provide a boon to application performance by allowing time consuming functions to operate in parallel and without blocking the main execution thread. This article explains how to use the Tasklet API to compose and execute asynchronous functions in Google App Engine. ...
I’ve spent the past eight months working from home thanks to some great support from my employer, allowing me to support my wife and children and still contribute as a meaningful employee. Working from home with four small children and a loving and supportive wife has brought its fair share of both challenges and delights. This post will describe the working from home experience and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. ...
I have been working on the problem of recording changes to an ndb model. One way to accomplish this is to stream data changes to a BigQuery table corresponding to the ndb model. It would be great to do this in a generic way which gives us the problem of generating a BigQuery table given an ndb model. This article will describe one solution to this problem. ...
An unfortunate DevOps task for any team running App Engine is restoring data from backups. One way to do this is by accessing the Google Cloud Storage URL for a given App Engine backup and importing that backup into BigQuery. This article will show you to get the Cloud Storage URL for an App Engine backup and manually perform that import. ...