Ok, so a bit of background on what we are doing.
We have various weather station and soil monitoring stations across the country that gather up data and then using FTP, upload to a server for processing.
Note: this server is not located in the GCP, but we are migrating all our services over at the moment.
Annoyingly FTP is the only service that these particular stations allow. Newer stations thankfully are using REST APIs instead, so that makes it much simpler.
I have written a small nodejs app that works with ftp-srv. This acts as the FTP server.
I have also written a new FileSystem class that will hook directly into Google Cloud Storage. So instead of getting a local directory, it reads the GCS directory.
This allows for weather stations to upload their dump files direct to GCP for processing.
My question is, what is the best service to use?
First I thought using App Engine, since its just a small nodejs app, I don't really want to have to go and create a VM for it just to run this.
However, I have found that I have been unsuccessful to open up port 21 and any other ports used for passive FTP.
I then thought using Kubernetes Engine. To be honest, I don't know anything at all about this, as of yet. But it seems like its a bit of an overkill just to run the small app.
My last thought would be to use Compute Engine. I have a working copy with PROFTPD installed and working, so I know I can get the ports open and have data flowing, but I feel that it's a bit overkill to run a full VM just for something that is acting as an intermediary between the weather stations and GCS.
Any recommendations would be very appreciated.
Thanks!
Kubernetes just for FTP would be using a crane to lift your fork.
Google Compute Engine and PROFTPD will fit in a micro instance at a whopping cost of about $6.00 per month.
The other Google Compute services do not support FTP. This includes:
App Engine Standard
App Engine Flexible
Cloud Run
Cloud Functions
This leaves you with either Kubernetes or Compute Engine.
Related
I'm moving my Three.js app and its customized node.js environment, which I've been running on my local machine to Google Cloud. I want to test things out there, and hopefully soon get some early alpha testing going with other people.
I'm not sure which is the wiser way to go... to upload the repo I've been running locally as-is onto a VM which users would then access via the VM's external IP until I get a good name to call this app... or merge my local node.js environment with what's available via the Google App Engine and run it on GAE.
Issues I'm running into with the linux VM approach... I'm not sure how to do the equivalent on the VM of what I've been doing locally. In Windows Powershell I cd into the app directory and then enter node index.js. I'm assuming by this method of deployment that I can get the app running as soon as the browser hits the external IP. I should mention too that the app will allow users to save content as well as upload images, and eventually, 3D models as well as json datasets.
Issues I'm running into with the App Engine approach: it looks like I only have access to a linux-based command line, and have to install all the node.js modules manually. Meanwhile I have a bunch of files to upload, both the server-side node files and all the frontend stuff. I don't see where to upload those files, and ultimately what I'd like to do is have access to a visual, editable file-tree interface, as I have in Windows and FileZilla, so I can swap files in and out, etc. Alternatively I suppose I could import a repo from Github? Github would be fine as long as I can visually see what's happening. Is there a visual interface for file structure available in GAE somewhere? Am I missing something?
I went through the GAE "Hello World" tutorial and that worked fine, but was left scratching my head afterward regarding how to actually see and edit the guts of the tutorial app, or even where to look for the files.
So first off, I want to determine what's the better approach, and then if possible, determine how to make the experience of getting my app up there and running a more visual, user-friendly experience.
Thanks.
There are many things to consider when choosing how to run an app, but my instinct for your use case is to simply use a VM on GCE. The most compelling reason for this is that it's the most similar thing to what you have now. You can SSH into the machine and run nohup node index.js & (or node index.js inside tmux/screen if you prefer) and it will start the app and not stop it when you log out of SSH. You can use SCP / SFTP with whatever GUI client you want to upload files. You don't have to learn anything new! If you wanted to, you could even use a Windows VM (although I think you have to pay a little more than for a comparable Linux VM due to the licensing fees).
That said, the other way is arguably more "correct" by modern development standards, but it will involve a lot more learning that will prevent you from getting your app running somewhere other than your laptop in the short term:
First, you'll need to learn about Docker and stateless containers, which is basically what your app runs inside of on AppEngine.
Next, you'll need to learn how to hook up a separate stateful service (database, file server, ...) to your app's container so you can store your files, etc. in it, and then probably rewrite your app somewhat to use it to store stuff.
Next, you'll probably want some way to automatically deploy this from code instead of manually doing it, which gets you into build systems, package managers, artifact storage, continuous integration systems, and on and on and on.
This latter path is certainly what you should choose for a long-running production service if you work with a big team of developers -- but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right path for your project today. If you don't care about scaling up automatically, load balancing between nodes, redundant copies of your app running in different regions in case there's a natural disaster, etc., then go with the easy way for now, and you can learn new ways to improve the service when they're actually needed.
I have a question regarding the Node Red dashboard. I've got my dashboard all set up and working. Now, I want to be able to access the dashboard outside of my local network. Right now I do this through a VNC server. What needs to happen next is that clients need to able to access the dashboard, but they are not getting access to my VNC server of course. I have done my fair amount of Google work. I (somewhat) understand that a service like ngrok (ngrok.com) or dataplicity (dataplicity.com) is what I am looking for. What would be the best way of setting this up safely?
Might be useful to clarify: I'm using a raspberry Pi!
Thanks in advance!
If you want to give the outside world access to your dashboard, you can also consider to host your node-red application in the cloud. See links at the bottom-left of page https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/
Most of those services have a free tier - so it might you cost nothing.
If you cannot deploy your complete node-red in the cloud (e.g. because it is reading local sensors) then you can split your node-red application into 2 node-red applications: one running locally and one (with the dashboard) running in the cloud. Of course then the 2 node-red applications need to exchange messages: for this the cloud services mentioned on that page also provides a secure way to send and receive events from the node-red cloud application that you can use.
does anyone have experience in using node.js server in a Cloud computing environment like Google Compute Engine/AWS that allows auto-scaling?
Is there any things to watch out for in your code if provider clones your node.js server across servers(Horizontal scaling)?
As long as your Node.js server is stateless, you can create a instance template of your server and use Google Autoscalar to automatically add or remove instances from a managed instance group based on increases or decreases in load. I recommend watching this video.
I am planning to use cloudfoundry paas service (from VMWare) for hosting my node.js application. I have seen that it has support for mongo and redis in the service layer and node.js framework. So far so good.
Now I need to store my mediafiles(images uploaded by users) to a filesystem. I have the metadata stored in Mongo.
I have been searching internet, but have not yet got good information.
You cannot do that for the following reasons:
There are multiple host machines running your application. They each have their own filesystems. Each running process in your application would see a different set of files.
The host machines on which your particular application is running can change moment-to-moment. Indeed, they will change every time you re-deploy your application. Every time a process is started on a new host machine, it will see an empty set of files. Every time a process is stopped on an old host machine, all the files would be permanently deleted.
You absolutely must solve this problem in another way.
Store the media files in MongoDB GridFS.
Store the media files in an object store such as Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files.
Filesystem in most cloud solutions are "ephemeral", so you can not use FS. You will have to use solutions like S3/ DB for such purpose
I have a Windows application that does some calculations and is called from command line. On my Windows machine, I have a PHP script running under Apache that executes the application and shows the output.
Is there any hosting solution that I can use to do the same? I can't figure out if EC2 or Azure are the right solutions. Basically, I need a web server + ability to execute my application.
Suggestions? Thanks.
You can host your application on AppHarbor, the .NET Platform-as-a-Service. You can either port your web frontend to .NET or try to get your PHP stuff working with Phalanger. AppHarbor is working on Background Tasks, which might be a good match for your workload.
I would just run the PHP script you already have under IIS in a Windows Azure web role.
If it is a Windows Application and you have the source code I would go with an Azure Worker Role. The advantage of using a PaaS (as Azure) instead of an IaaS (as Amazon) is that you wont have to bother of keeping the server up to date.
The real investment in time will be when you rewrite your application to make it work as a Worker Role. The time needed to do this work depends on how your application works right now. If is uses a lot of disc access it might be difficult and perhaps an Amazon server would be better. But if it only crunches numbers in memory an Azure Worker Role is a very good candidate.
The real advantage of using an Amazon server is that you probably wont need to do any work at all. Except maintaining the server.
As described in the question both Azure and EC2 will do the job very well. This is the kind of task both systems are designed for.
So the question becomes really: which is best? That depends on two things: what the application needs to do and your own experience and preference.
As it's a Windows application there should probably be a leaning towards Azure. While EC2 supports Windows, the tooling and support resources for Azure are probably deeper at this point.
If cost is a factor then a (somewhat outdated) resource is here: http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/10/30/public-cloud-hourly-cost-comparison/ -- the conclusion is that, by and large, Azure and Amazon are roughly similar for compute charges.
Steve Marx has a blog post that describes how to run another web server (i.e not IIS) on Azure
This potentially has everything you need - you can deploy Apache and your executable and run it in exactly the same way.
Alternatively - you can deploy your executable along side a bit of code in a worker role that would run that application periodically, all depending on your exact requirements