When designing a web API, not only do you have to think about the happy path when everything is alright, but you also have to handle all the error cases: Is the payload received correct? Is there a typo in a field? Do you need more context about the problem that occured? There’s only a limited set of status codes that can convey the kind of error you’re getting, but sometimes you need to explain more clearly what the error is about. Read more...

Here are some general tips and tricks that we found useful as we used Google Cloud Workflows: Avoid hard-coding URLs Since Workflows is all about calling APIs and service URLs, it’s important to have some clean way to handle those URLs. You can hard-code them in your workflow definition, but the problem is that your workflow can become harder to maintain. In particular, what happens when you work with multiple environments? Read more...

I wanted to track the number of views, and also likes, of some YouTube videos I was featured in. For example, when I present a talk at a conference, often the video becomes available at a later time, and I’m not the owner of the channel or video. At first, I wanted to use the YouTube Data API, but I had the impression that I could only see the stats of videos or channels I own, however I think I might be wrong, and should probably revisit this approach later on. Read more...

In this article, let’s revisit the topic of deploying Java apps on Cloud Run. In particular, I’ll deploy a Micronaut app, written with Java 17, and built with Gradle. With a custom Dockerfile On Cloud Run, you deploy containerised applications, so you have to decide the way you want to build a container for your application. In a previous article, I showed an example of using your own Dockerfile, which would look as follows with an OpenJDK 17, and enabling preview features of the language: Read more...

It’s all Richard Seroter’s fault, I ended up dabbling with Golang! We were chatting about a use case using Google Cloud Workflows and a Cloud Run service implemented in Go. So it was the occasion to play a bit with Go. Well, I still don’t like error handling… But let’s rewind the story a bit! Workflows is a fully-managed service/API orchestrator on Google Cloud. You can create some advanced business workflows using YAML syntax. Read more...

Every year in France, around mid-September, there’s a special weekend where everyone can visit some famous places, usually closed the rest of the year. That’s “Journée du Patrimoine”. For example, you can visit places like the Elysée Palace or the Matignon Palace, if you want to see where the French president, or the French prime minister work. However, for some of those places, it’s tricky to register online to book a slot, as there’s always a high demand for them. Read more...

Time to spill the beans and show the gems, to our friendly snakes and elephants: we’ve got some great news for Java, Ruby, Python and PHP serverless developers today. Google App Engine and Cloud Functions are adding new modern runtimes, allowing you to update to the major version release trains of those programming languages. In short, here’s what’s new: Access to App Engine legacy bundled services for Java 11/17, Python 3 and Go 1. Read more...

There are different ways to launch the execution of a workflow. In previous articles, we mentioned that you can use the gcloud command-line tool to create an execution, you can also use the various client libraries to invoke Workflows, or use the REST API. A workflow itself can also invoke other workflows! But today, I’d like to tell you how to schedule the execution of a workflow. For that purpose, we’ll take advantage of Cloud Scheduler. Read more...

Workflows allows you to call APIs, whether from or hosted on Google Cloud, or any external API in the wild. A few days ago, for example, we saw an example on how to use the SendGrid API to send emails from a workflow. However, in that article, I had the API key hard-coded into my workflow, which is a bad practice. Instead, we can store secrets in Secret Manager. Workflows has a specific connector for Secret Manager, and a useful method to access secrets. Read more...

Following up the article on writing and reading JSON files in cloud storage buckets (GCS), we saw that we could access the data of the JSON file, and use it in our workflow. Let’s have a look at a concrete use of this. Today, we’ll take advantage of this mechanism to avoid hard-coding the URLs of the APIs we call from our workflow. That way, it makes the workflow more portable across environments. Read more...