StripeCon 2021: A Cloud-Native approach to running Silverstripe on Google Cloud Platform

1 | xpon.ai © 2021 XPON Technologies Pty Ltd
A Cloud Native Approach
to running Silverstripe on
Google Cloud Platform
XPON Technologies
Virtual StripeCon Europe 2021

2 | xpon.ai © 2021 XPON Technologies AU/NZ
@jkersu
@jonathonsu
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@jker_su
Jon Su
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XPON is a
technology
company
for the next generation
of marketing and
customer experience
(CX).
An era that is richly immersive,
powered by data and made intelligent
with AI.

Today’s Talk
A Cloud-Native Approach to running Silverstripe
on Google Cloud Platform

Overview
1. A Bit of History
2. What is Cloud Native?
3. Integrating Silverstripe and GCP
4. Other things to know...

Prerequisites
● A basic working Silverstripe 4 project
● GCP Account (because we’re using GCP)
● No infrastructure background required

A Bit of History

How hosting used to be done

Some Problems
● Medium-Sized and Enterprise Projects
● Uptime Guarantee
● Security
● Resource Hogging Applications == Crash!
● Cost vs Scalability

Deployment
Quick Deployment != Quick Rollback

Managed Hosting Services
● Have a professional supporting you is great! But…
○ Reliance on 3rd party to install software
packages
○ Cost / Fees
○ Support response time
○ Self-Hosting - Lot of maintenance work

The Checklist
● Simple but scalable infrastructure
● Robust deployment and rollback
● Most importantly Self-Service
● Backups, Monitoring and Logging

What is Cloud Native?
An approach in software development that
utilizes cloud computing to “build and run
scalable applications in modern, dynamic
environments such as public, private and hybrid
clouds”.
“

Serverless
Cloud Native
Fully
Managed Services
Buzzy
Keywords

Serverless

Fully Managed Services
● Focus on using a service, not setting it up
● No server / infrastructure management
● Cloud Provider has your back:
○ Hardware Configuration
○ Scaling
○ Maintenance
○ Security Patches

What is Cloud Native?
● Automation
● Stateless Components
● Managed Services
● Components are separate but integrate with
each other
● Only Constant is Change

Covers the entire Digital Customer
Experience journey from App
Modernisation to Cloud Martech and
Adtech in the one Cloud.
Why
GCP?

Integrating
Silverstripe
with GCP
MVP Approach

3 Key Services
Assets
Database
Server

GCP Architecture

Cloud Storage
● Equivalent to AWS S3 Bucket
● Objects - files, images, video etc
● Priced for storage (duration), network etc
operations

Setting up Cloud Storage
● Create Bucket
● Create 2 new folders:
○ public/
○ protected/
● New Service Account
○ Give appropriate permission to read/write

Setting up Cloud Storage

Configure Silverstripe with Cloud Storage
● Install module: https://github.com/obj63mc/silverstripe-google-
cloud-storage
● Change access for /public and /protected as per repo docs
● Environment variables:
○ GC_BUCKET_NAME
○ GC_KEY_FILE: Service Account JSON string

Cloud SQL
● Fully Managed Database Service
● MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server
● Failover, replication and backups
● 99.95% uptime - 43s per day
● CPU / RAM / Storage / Networking Pricing

Alternative
Run a database on a virtual machine
Bad Idea!

Cloud SQL Auth Proxy

1. Enable Cloud SQL API
2. Create Cloud SQL instance
3. Create a database
4. Create a database user
5. Connect Silverstripe with Cloud SQL
Setting up
Cloud SQL

Enable API

Create Cloud SQL instance

Create a database

Create a database user

Remember the Connection name

Missing socket and flags parameters...
Credits to https://github.com/elliot-sawyer/silverstripe-mysql-ssl
for showing the workaround!
Connect Silverstripe with Cloud SQL

Connect Silverstripe with Cloud SQL

GCP_MySQLDatabase.php

GCP_MySQLiConnector.php

Key Silverstripe Env Variables
Variable Description
SS_DATABASE_NAME Name of the database in Cloud SQL to use
SS_DATABASE_PASSWORD Password of user to connect to Cloud SQL with
SS_DATABASE_USERNAME Database user to connect to Cloud SQL with
SS_DATABASE_CLASS Our custom database class
SS_DATABASE_SERVER NULL
SS_DATABASE_PORT 3306
DATABASE_SOCKET Custom ENV variable. The Cloud SQL database socket in format:
cloudsql/[CONNECTION-NAME]

GCP Compute Options

App Engine
● Fully Managed Serverless PaaS Offering
● Code-first Platform - Write code and deploy
● Streamline deployment
○ No servers to manually provision -
app.yaml
● Simplify scalability

Every problem become a code problem!

App Engine Standard vs Flexible
Standard Flexible
Specific versions of languages supported
(PHP, Python, Java etc)
Any runtime that support HTTP request
No writing to local file system(exc. /tmp) No sandbox restraints
No SSH Can SSH
Limited 3rd party software installations Support for 3rd party binaries
Pay per instance class, with automatic
shutdown
Pay for resource allocation per hour, no
automatic shutdown
All requests time out at 60 seconds Runs in a container

Versions - Traffic Splitting

Blue-Green Deployments

Canary Deployment

Setting up a Load Balancer
Skip...Built into App Engine!

Deploying App Engine - app.yaml
Make sure Cloud SQL setting is on!
https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/connect-
app-engine-flexible

Installing Packages
● composer install is ran on deployment
● auth.json in project to read from private repo

PHP Extensions
● php.ini or composer.json

gcloud app deploy app.yaml
(*Flags can be passed to command)

You can visit the App Engine subdomain URL to use the site.

What happens during a deployment?

Ignoring files - .gcloudignore

Other things to know….
● Email - 3rd Party Services (SendGrid, Mailgun etc)
● Time in UTC - Use library like “carbon” to convert
● Logging - GCP Operations Suites + Monolog
● Versions - Delete “unnecessary” versions!
● Managing Secrets
● Just a starting point -> CDN, Cloud Functions, K8s

Custom Domains

SSL

CI / CD

It’s not hard to start adopting the Cloud!

Thanks!

StripeCon 2021: A Cloud-Native approach to running Silverstripe on Google Cloud Platform

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