TL;DR: When a Cloud Build invocation is triggered by a GitHub Pull Request, you can now use the substitution values _HEAD_BRANCH, _BASE_BRANCH, _HEAD_REPO_URL, and _PR_NUMBER in the build config. Google’s Cloud Build is a cloud-native CI/CD service available in Google Cloud Platform. When you connect it to GitHub repo hosting…

TL;DR Save in-memory data to the /workspace volume mount, and it will be available to all subsequent build steps. Google Cloud Build runs your build as a series of steps which execute in isolated containerized environments. After each step, the container is discarded. Poof! …

Because we totally need another one DevOps is a theory: Through continuous investment in automation and communication, we achieve measurable improvements to process velocity and systems quality. These improvements generate value to our customers. Like evolution, or gravity, the theory of DevOps is supported by evidence, so it grows and adapts over time. Its origin is in the technical domain (in particular, software development, deployment, and operations), but we may discover interesting things by applying DevOps elsewhere.

TL;DR: use global environment variables to specify the GKE cluster you want to work with. Google Cloud Build is a hosted CI/CD solution that can be used to achieve low-cost, zero-maintenance continuous delivery to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It’s easy to configure Cloud Build to build a container (or three)…

At NYC CoffeeOps this morning, we stumbled onto an interesting idea: Virtual Machines programmed to get “rusty”—as they age, their reliability starts to degrade until they become unusable. Wait, they get worse… on purpose? Yep! Here’s the context: in the cloud, we launch a lot of VM instances (and/or containers). Hopefully, at the time an instance…

Save money by launching compute instances with preset lifespans. — Update 2022–12–06: GCP has added a feature called automated termination which makes it super easy to direct your VMs to self-destruct. Give it a try! A great thing about the cloud is that it’s super easy to spin up new virtual machines (VMs). A less-great thing is that it’s also…

Does this sound familiar? “Oh, fiddlesticks! There’s a problem in prod! I need to fix it right away! Good news: I know where the bug is. So I’ll just make this teensy little fix. No time to run tests… it’s such a small change, I’ll just push it to prod. …

TL;DR: Use bash as your entrypoint and add || echo 'failed' to your command Google’s Cloud Build (GCB) automation system is serverless and stateless — when the build fails, the process exits and all resources used are cleaned up. That’s great for cost management and preventing security holes, but sometimes…

Say the magic words, and GCB opens up with hidden potential UPDATE: There’s now a documentation page on cloud.google.com with a more thorough and otherwise better explanation of how to do bash scripting in Cloud Build. Read that, instead of this! Google’s Cloud Build automation platform is modeled on a…