Deploy an app using GKE Autopilot and Spanner

Autopilot

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This tutorial describes how to deploy a containerized web application to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster, and use a Google Spanner database in the backend to store data. The sample application manages a table of game players. You can add and delete players through the app's graphical user interface (GUI).

Spanner is a fully managed, horizontally scalable, globally distributed, relational database service that provides ACID transactions and SQL semantics without compromising on performance and high availability.

Before reading this page, ensure that you're familiar with Kubernetes.

Why GKE and Spanner

As a developer, you might not want to spend time figuring out the amount of storage and compute resources your application needs, or predicting RAM and CPU consumption during periods of fluctuating demands, or worrying about application failure at peak load.

By using GKE Autopilot as a fully managed Kubernetes service, and Spanner as a fully managed database service, you can develop and deploy apps faster on a stable infrastructure that simplifies configuring and managing resources. GKE Autopilot handles configuring and scaling the infrastructure for hosting your app by adding or removing nodes to or from the cluster, based on the requirements at runtime. Similarly, Spanner can dynamically scale out and in with minimal manual intervention, as storage or compute requirements change.

For example, consider you are launching the next blockbuster game which you expect to go viral, and therefore attract heavy web traffic during its launch week. Spanner can help you accommodate this surging throughput by providing the ability to instantly increase, decrease, or reallocate compute resources while still maintaining maximum application availability with GKE Autopilot.

Objectives

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

• Create a Spanner database that stores a registry of players.

• Deploy a sample web app called hello-app-cloud-spanner, with a graphical user interface.

The following table describes the Google Cloud resources you create or use, the variables they are identified with, and the values prescribed for them for the purpose of this tutorial:

Resource	Variable	Value
Google Cloud project ID	PROJECT_ID	The Project ID generated when you create a project. Example: my-gcp-project
Compute region	COMPUTE_REGION	The Compute Engine region where you want to create the Spanner instance and GKE cluster. We recommend that you choose a region closest to your customers' geographical location, but for this tutorial, use us-west1.
Spanner instance	-	hello-instance
Spanner database	-	hello-database
GKE Autopilot cluster	CLUSTER_NAME	hello-cluster
Kubernetes namespace	NAMESPACE	hello-namespace
Kubernetes service account	KSA_NAME	ksa-helloapp
IAM service account	GSA_NAME	gsa-helloapp
Project ID of the IAM service account	GSA_PROJECT	Your Google Cloud PROJECT_ID.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we recommend creating new resources, which makes deleting them easy and risk free after you have deployed the sample app. However, if you have any existing namespaces, IAM service accounts, and Kubernetes service accounts, you can use them.

Costs

In this document, you use the following billable components of Google Cloud:

• Compute Engine instances used by GKE
• Spanner
• Cloud Load Balancing

To generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage, use the pricing calculator.

New Google Cloud users might be eligible for a free trial.

When you finish the tasks that are described in this document, you can avoid continued billing by deleting the resources that you created. For more information, see Clean up.

Before you begin

Make sure to complete the following prerequisites:

Select or create a project

You can use an existing project, or create a new one for this tutorial.

Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

Go to project selector

Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

Go to project selector

Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the APIs

Enable the Artifact Registry, Compute Engine, GKE, and IAM Service Account Credentials APIs.

Enable the APIs

Set up Cloud Shell

In this tutorial, you use Cloud Shell to run gcloud and kubectl commands. Cloud Shell is a shell environment for managing resources hosted on Google Cloud. It comes preinstalled with the Google Cloud CLI and kubectl command-line tool.

In the Google Cloud console, activate Cloud Shell.

Activate Cloud Shell

At the bottom of the Google Cloud console, a Cloud Shell session starts and displays a command-line prompt. Cloud Shell is a shell environment with the Google Cloud CLI already installed and with values already set for your current project. It can take a few seconds for the session to initialize.

A Cloud Shell session opens inside a frame lower on the console.

Before you run commands in this tutorial, make sure that your default project is set to the project ID where you want to deploy the sample app. If it's not already set, run the following command in the Cloud Shell:

gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

Replace PROJECT_ID with your project ID.

Grant IAM roles

Ensure that your Google Cloud account has the required IAM roles for this tutorial.

Make sure that you have the following role or roles on the project: roles/iam.serviceAccountAdmin, roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageConsumer, roles/iam.serviceAccountUser, roles/iam.securityAdmin, roles/spanner.admin, roles/container.admin

Check for the roles

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

   Go to IAM
2. Select the project.

3. In the Principal column, find all rows that identify you or a group that you're included in. To learn which groups you're included in, contact your administrator.

4. For all rows that specify or include you, check the Role column to see whether the list of roles includes the required roles.

Grant the roles

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

   Go to IAM
2. Select the project.
3. Click Grant access.

4. In the New principals field, enter your user identifier. This is typically the email address for a Google Account.

5. In the Select a role list, select a role.
6. To grant additional roles, click Add another role and add each additional role.
7. Click Save.

Configure Spanner

To configure Spanner, you need to create a Spanner instance and a Spanner database.

Create a Spanner instance

A Spanner instance is an allocation of resources that is used by Spanner databases created in that instance.

Create a Spanner instance called hello-instance with a regional configuration, and compute capacity of 100 processing units.

gcloud spanner instances create hello-instance \
    --config=regional-COMPUTE_REGION \
    --description="Spanner sample instance" \
    --processing-units=100

Replace COMPUTE_REGION with us-west1 for this tutorial.

Create a Spanner database

A Spanner database includes your tables, views, and indexes. A database inherits properties from its parent instance, such as its configuration (regional or multi-regional), available compute capacity, and storage.

Create a Spanner database called hello-database with a table called Players, by using the GoogleSQL dialect. Run the following query in your Cloud Shell:

gcloud spanner databases create hello-database \
    --instance=hello-instance \
    --database-dialect=GOOGLE_STANDARD_SQL \
    --ddl="CREATE TABLE Players (
        PlayerUuid STRING(36) NOT NULL,
        FirstName STRING(1024),
        LastName STRING(1024),
        BirthDate DATE) PRIMARY KEY(PlayerUuid)"

Create a GKE Autopilot cluster

After you've configured Spanner, create an Autopilot cluster and use Workload Identity Federation for GKE to access your database in a secure and manageable way.

Create an Autopilot cluster named hello-cluster. Autopilot clusters have Workload Identity Federation for GKE enabled by default.

gcloud container clusters create-auto CLUSTER_NAME \
  --region=COMPUTE_REGION

Replace the following:

• CLUSTER_NAME: hello-cluster
• COMPUTE_REGION: the Compute Engine region of your cluster. For this tutorial, use the same region, us-west1, where you created the Spanner instance. We recommend that you create the Spanner instance and the GKE Autopilot cluster within the same region to reduce latency.

It can take up to 8-10 minutes to create the cluster.

The output is similar to the following:

NAME: hello-cluster
LOCATION: us-west1
MASTER_VERSION: 1.26.5-gke.1200
MASTER_IP: 192.0.2.1
MACHINE_TYPE: e2-medium
NODE_VERSION: 1.26.5-gke.1200
NUM_NODES: 3
STATUS: RUNNING

Configure the cluster to use Workload Identity Federation for GKE

Configure your cluster to authenticate to Google Cloud using Workload Identity Federation for GKE before you deploy the app.

1. Get credentials to access your cluster:

   gcloud container clusters get-credentials CLUSTER_NAME \
     --region=COMPUTE_REGION
   

   Replace the following:

   • CLUSTER_NAME: hello-cluster
   • COMPUTE_REGION: us-west1

   This updates a kubeconfig file with appropriate credentials and endpoint information to point kubectl at your cluster.

2. Create a namespace to use for the Kubernetes service account. You can also use the default namespace, or any existing namespace.

   kubectl create namespace NAMESPACE
   

   Replace NAMESPACE with hello-namespace, the name for the new namespace you are creating.

3. Create a Kubernetes service account for your application to use:

   kubectl create serviceaccount KSA_NAME \
     --namespace NAMESPACE
   

   Replace the following:

   • KSA_NAME: ksa-helloapp, the name for the new Kubernetes service account you are creating.
   • NAMESPACE: hello-namespace

4. Create an IAM service account for your application:

   gcloud iam service-accounts create GSA_NAME \
     --project=GSA_PROJECT
   

   Replace the following:

   • GSA_NAME: gsa-helloapp, the name for the new IAM service account you are creating.
   • GSA_PROJECT: your Google Cloud project ID. In this tutorial, you are creating the IAM service account in the same Google Cloud project where you are deploying the sample app. Hence your GSA_PROJECT and Google Cloud PROJECT_ID are the same.

5. Add an IAM policy binding for your IAM service account to read and write to Spanner:

   gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \
     --member "serviceAccount:GSA_NAME@PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com" \
     --role "roles/spanner.admin"
   

   Replace the following:

   • PROJECT_ID: your Google Cloud project ID
   • GSA_NAME: gsa-helloapp

   Example:

   gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding my-gcp-project \
     --member "serviceAccount:[e-mail]" \
     --role "roles/spanner.admin"

6. Allow the Kubernetes service account to impersonate the IAM service account by adding an IAM policy binding between the two service accounts. This binding allows the Kubernetes service account to act as the IAM service account, so that the Kubernetes service account can read and write to Spanner.

   gcloud iam service-accounts add-iam-policy-binding GSA_NAME@GSA_PROJECT.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
     --role roles/iam.workloadIdentityUser \
     --member "serviceAccount:PROJECT_ID.svc.id.goog[NAMESPACE/KSA_NAME]"
   

   Replace the following:

   • GSA_NAME: gsa-helloapp
   • GSA_PROJECT: your Google Cloud project ID
   • PROJECT_ID: your Google Cloud project ID
   • NAMESPACE: hello-namespace
   • KSA_NAME: ksa-helloapp

   Example:

   gcloud iam service-accounts add-iam-policy-binding [e-mail] \
     --role roles/iam.workloadIdentityUser \
     --member "serviceAccount:my-gcp-project.svc.id.goog[hello-namespace/ksa-helloapp]"

7. Annotate the Kubernetes service account with the email address of the IAM service account. This lets your sample app know which service account to use to access Google Cloud services. So when the app uses any standard Google API Client Libraries to access Google Cloud services, it uses that IAM service account.

   kubectl annotate serviceaccount KSA_NAME \
     --namespace NAMESPACE \
     iam.gke.io/gcp-service-account=GSA_NAME@GSA_PROJECT.iam.gserviceaccount.com
   

   Replace the following:

   • KSA_NAME: ksa-helloapp
   • NAMESPACE: hello-namespace
   • GSA_NAME: gsa-helloapp
   • GSA_PROJECT: your Google Cloud project ID

   Example:

   kubectl annotate serviceaccount ksa-helloapp \
     --namespace hello-namespace \
     iam.gke.io/gcp-service-account=[e-mail]

   Note: If the IAM binding does not exist, this annotation by itself does not grant access to the Pod to impersonate the IAM service account.

Deploy the sample app to the cluster

Now that you have set up GKE and Spanner with the necessary services and authentication, you are ready to deploy the sample app hello-app-cloud-spanner.

1. Clone the sample app from the GitHub repository to your Cloud Shell:

   git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes-engine-samples.git
   

2. Launch the Cloud Shell Editor by clicking Open Editor on the toolbar of the terminal window.

   For more information, see Cloud Shell Editor interface overview.

3. Open the Cloud Shell Editor's Explorer pane, and browse to the kubernetes-engine-samples/databases/hello-app-cloud-spanner/k8s directory.

4. Open the deployment.yaml file, and update the serviceAccountName field by replacing <KSA_NAME> with ksa-helloapp, the name of your Kubernetes service account.

   

   Figure 1. Update Kubernetes service account name in the deployment file.

5. Close the Cloud Shell Editor, and return to the Cloud Shell terminal.

6. In the Cloud Shell terminal, navigate to the hello-app-cloud-spanner directory:

   cd kubernetes-engine-samples/databases/hello-app-cloud-spanner
   

7. Deploy the application:

   kubectl apply -f k8s/deployment.yaml -n=NAMESPACE
   

   Replace NAMESPACE with hello-namespace.

8. Wait for the application to be deployed with STATUS as Running:

   kubectl get pods -n=NAMESPACE --watch
   

   Replace NAMESPACE with hello-namespace.

   The output is similar to the following:

   NAME                                       READY   STATUS              RESTARTS   AGE
   hello-app-cloud-spanner-765c9b8779-lfcrc   0/1     ContainerCreating   0          87s
   hello-app-cloud-spanner-765c9b8779-lfcrc   1/1     Running             0          3m15s
   

9. Press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to return to the command prompt to run further commands.

Expose the sample app to the internet

To expose a Kubernetes Service outside the cluster, create a Service of type LoadBalancer. This type of Service generates an external load balancer IP address for your Pods, reachable through the internet.

1. Deploy the load balancer:

   kubectl apply -f k8s/service.yaml -n=NAMESPACE
   

   Replace NAMESPACE with hello-namespace.

2. Watch for an external IP address to be assigned:

   kubectl get service -n=NAMESPACE --watch
   

   Replace NAMESPACE with hello-namespace.

3. Once assigned, copy the EXTERNAL-IP (for example, 203.0.113.0) and open it in a browser. A web interface opens that displays and manages the database of players.

4. You can use the app GUI to create or delete player records, and they are saved in the Spanner database.

   

   Figure 2. Create or delete players in the registry.

   Run the following query to verify if the Spanner database has been updated with your entries:

   gcloud spanner databases execute-sql hello-database \
     --instance=hello-instance \
     --sql="SELECT * FROM Players LIMIT 10"
   

   The output is similar to the following:

   PlayerUuid: a1f34bbf-929c-498d-8b16-39bbb29d70e3
   FirstName: John
   LastName: Smith
   BirthDate: 1997-07-12
   
   PlayerUuid: d634e157-96ea-45f2-be3f-fb907ced188e
   FirstName: Jane
   LastName: Doe
   BirthDate: 2013-07-12
   

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used in this tutorial, either delete the project that contains the resources, or keep the project and delete the individual resources.

Delete your project

The easiest way to avoid billing is to delete the project you created for this tutorial.

Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:

• Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for the tasks in this document, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.

If you plan to explore multiple architectures, tutorials, or quickstarts, reusing projects can help you avoid exceeding project quota limits.

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Manage resources page.

Go to Manage resources

In the project list, select the project that you want to delete, and then click Delete.

In the dialog, type the project ID, and then click Shut down to delete the project.

If you deleted the project, your clean up is complete. If you didn't delete the project, proceed to delete the GKE and Spanner resources.

Delete GKE resources

1. Delete the service. This deallocates the Google Cloud load balancer created for your Service:

   kubectl delete service hello-app-cloud-spanner -n=NAMESPACE
   

   Replace NAMESPACE with hello-namespace.

2. Delete the GKE cluster. This deletes the resources that constitute a cluster, such as the compute instances, disks, and network resources:

   gcloud container clusters delete CLUSTER_NAME --region=COMPUTE_REGION
   

   Replace the following:

   • CLUSTER_NAME: hello-cluster
   • COMPUTE_REGION: us-west1

Delete Spanner resources

1. Delete the Spanner database:

   gcloud spanner databases delete hello-database --instance=hello-instance
   

2. Delete the Spanner instance:

   Caution: Deleting an instance permanently removes the instance, and all its databases.

   gcloud spanner instances delete hello-instance
   

What's next

• Learn how to create a GKE cluster for your Agones install.
• Learn the best practices for using Spanner as a gaming database.
• Learn how you can deploy a highly-available PostgreSQL database on GKE.
• Learn the best practices for deploying databases on GKE.