Reliability design principles in GCP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reliability Design Principles in GCP

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud engineer for a small online store. Your task is to design a simple, reliable infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that can handle user requests even if some parts fail.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic GCP setup using Compute Engine instances behind a Load Balancer with health checks to ensure reliability.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of Compute Engine instance names

Set a threshold for minimum healthy instances

Use a loop to create instance configurations

Add a health check configuration to the load balancer

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

This project models how cloud engineers set up reliable infrastructure components on GCP to keep services running smoothly even when some parts fail.

💼 Career

Understanding reliability design principles and how to configure health checks and instance groups is essential for roles like Cloud Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, and DevOps Engineer.

1

Create a list of Compute Engine instance names

Create a list called instance_names with these exact values: "web-server-1", "web-server-2", and "web-server-3".

GCP

# Create a list called instance_names with the given instance names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and include the names as strings separated by commas.

2

Set a threshold for minimum healthy instances

Create a variable called min_healthy_instances and set it to the integer 2.

GCP

instance_names = ["web-server-1", "web-server-2", "web-server-3"]
# Create a variable min_healthy_instances and set it to 2
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment statement to set the variable.

3

Create instance configurations using a loop

Use a for loop with the variable name to iterate over instance_names. Inside the loop, create a dictionary called instance_config with keys "name" set to name and "status" set to "running". Append each instance_config to a list called instances. Initialize instances as an empty list before the loop.

GCP

instance_names = ["web-server-1", "web-server-2", "web-server-3"]
min_healthy_instances = 2
# Initialize an empty list called instances
# Use a for loop with variable name to iterate over instance_names
# Inside the loop, create instance_config dictionary and append it to instances
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to create the list before the loop and append each dictionary inside the loop.

4

Add a health check configuration to the load balancer

Create a dictionary called health_check with keys "type" set to "HTTP", "port" set to 80, and "healthy_threshold" set to min_healthy_instances.

GCP

instance_names = ["web-server-1", "web-server-2", "web-server-3"]
min_healthy_instances = 2
instances = []
for name in instance_names:
    instance_config = {"name": name, "status": "running"}
    instances.append(instance_config)
# Create a health_check dictionary with the specified keys and values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with the exact keys and values as described.