Invision Community in Google Cloud (GCP)

[Cowboy Denny]

I am looking at moving my site from my current great hosting platform (liquidweb) to using something like Google Cloud to help me start getting my foot in the door with Cloud Computing.  Yea, I know AWS is the leader in this space but they did get over 6 years head start when the cloud boom was happening.

Had anyone deployed Invision Community in Google Cloud?  I see a ton of Wordpress sites for around $18/month in the Google Marketplace but who wants that crap where they nickel, dime you to death with every little thing you want to do?  Not me..  been there, learned my lesson and I'm sticking with Invision Community but unfortunately since I want to stick with Invision Community I run into situations like this were its not in the marketplace.

I'm considering just picking a LAMP CentOS 7 install in Marketplace to get the basics installed.  I considered a PLESK install but not sure that would get me where I want to be.

Ultimate goal would be to just replicate a standard hosting plan where you can have multiple sites on your instance without costing a fortune.

Anyone been where I'm at and figured out a way to put Invision Community on Google Cloud?  I would really really appreciate some guidance on the right way to do this.

Any help is appreciated

[CoffeeCake]

Yes, we use Google Cloud SQL for the SQL backend and Compute Engines for the frontend to host our large community. We use standard distro linux servers in Compute Engine, without any sort of plesk/cPanel/etc. If you're only comfortable using something like that, then you have the freedom and ability to provision accordingly. It may be possible to use App Engine for the front end, however we did not go that route. We do not host anything other than our Invision community on our IPS-specific instances, and for other projects, create separate instances as needed. We have a number of administrative web-based tools that run on separate SQL and engine instances. In our situation, isolating these things from each other makes sense.

We were able to significantly reduce costs compared to what we were paying with leased dedicated servers through what's now IBM's datacenter offering, and can take advantage of the ability to quickly scale. It also helps us with our testing environment, as we can quickly spin up copies of production for testing upgrades and new extension/application deployment. As GCP offered an initial credit for new customers, we were able to get a sense for average cost and correctly size our instances during the trial period without the risk of actual costs incurred while we tested things out and continued running our legacy infrastructure.

Highly recommend. We have not tried Azure nor Amazon's offerings, so I can't speak to comparison on that end.

[shiobi]

5 hours ago, Paul E. said:

Yes, we use Google Cloud SQL for the SQL backend and Compute Engines for the frontend to host our large community. We use standard distro linux servers in Compute Engine, without any sort of plesk/cPanel/etc. If you're only comfortable using something like that, then you have the freedom and ability to provision accordingly. It may be possible to use App Engine for the front end, however we did not go that route. We do not host anything other than our Invision community on our IPS-specific instances, and for other projects, create separate instances as needed. We have a number of administrative web-based tools that run on separate SQL and engine instances. In our situation, isolating these things from each other makes sense.

We were able to significantly reduce costs compared to what we were paying with leased dedicated servers through what's now IBM's datacenter offering, and can take advantage of the ability to quickly scale. It also helps us with our testing environment, as we can quickly spin up copies of production for testing upgrades and new extension/application deployment. As GCP offered an initial credit for new customers, we were able to get a sense for average cost and correctly size our instances during the trial period without the risk of actual costs incurred while we tested things out and continued running our legacy infrastructure.

Highly recommend. We have not tried Azure nor Amazon's offerings, so I can't speak to comparison on that end.

Great answer! I want to ask... what happens if you have a ddos attack? How are you protected from that? I know you pay only what you use when you are on cloud, but if someone uses layer 7 attacks (and bypasses Cloudflare), what should you do? It will cost a ton from network usage 😞

[CoffeeCake]

We use Cloudflare, and only accept inbound connections via Cloudflare's proxies:

https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/cdn-interconnect#providers

 

Edited November 6, 2020 by Paul E.

[jair101]

@Paul E., is SQL the only thing you have offloaded outside of Compute Engine? What about object storage, elasticsearch, redis?

[CoffeeCake]

At the moment, yes, @jair101. Though we have been monitoring load and usage to see if the pricing makes sense to offload additionally from Compute Engine.