We went from a single monolith to a set of microservices that are small, lightweight, and easy to implement. Microservices enable reusability, make it easier to change and scale apps on demand but they also introduce new problems. How do microservices interact with each other toward a common goal? How do you figure out what went wrong when a business process composed of several microservices fails? Should there be a central orchestrator controlling all interactions between services or should each service work independently, in a loosely coupled way, and only interact through shared events? 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...

Following up the article on writing and reading JSON files in cloud storage buckets, 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...

At enterprises across industries, documents are at the center of core business processes. Documents store a treasure trove of valuable information whether it’s a company’s invoices, HR documents, tax forms and much more. However, the unstructured nature of documents make them difficult to work with as a data source. We call this “dark data” or unstructured data that businesses collect, process and store but do not utilize for purposes such as analytics, monetization, etc. Read more...

One year after Google App Engine was released in 2008, Java became the second language runtime available on the platform. Java developers were able to deploy and scale their servlet-based web applications easily, without worrying about infrastructure management. Not only Java was able to run then, but alternative JVM languages, like Apache Groovy, and Kotlin are also part of the game. Fast forward to today, we’re pleased to announce that the Java Runtime for App Engine is now available as open source, in the GoogleCloudPlatform/appengine-java-standard repository on Github. Read more...