Google Cloud Platform Docker: A Step-by-Step Guide

Google Cloud Platform Docker is a powerful tool that allows you to containerize your applications, making it easy to deploy and manage them on the cloud.

You can use Docker on Google Cloud Platform to create a containerized application, which can be deployed to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster.

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Docker on Google Cloud Platform, from creating a Docker container to deploying it to a GKE cluster.

To get started, you'll need to create a Google Cloud Platform account and enable the Docker service on your project.

Getting Started with Google Cloud Platform and Docker is a breeze. You can start by selecting the region where you want your container to run and giving it a name.

To secure your container, you can choose to use Cloud IAM, which is useful for deploying internal services and securing them from unauthorized access.

Next, you'll configure the first revision of the container service, using a URL for an image from the Docker registry or Google Container Registry.

Under Advanced Settings, you can configure the port to send to the container, as well as specific entry point commands and arguments.

You can also adjust the Capacity settings to change the concurrent request limit, request timeout, number of CPU cores, and memory allocated to each instance.

Autoscaling will automatically scale up your service if needed, but you can lower the maximum number of instances if you're concerned about cost.

Once you click Create, your service will start, and you'll be able to view its details from the Cloud Run console, including the URL for connecting to the container.

To set up a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project for Docker, you'll need to enable the Google Container Registry API. This API is required to use the Container Registry, which is a private registry for your Docker images.

The Container Registry can be found in the Cloud Console UI under Container Registry. You'll need to navigate to this section to access your private registry.

To install Docker and Docker Compose on your VM, you'll need to follow the official Debian installation instructions for Docker Engine. This will allow you to start a container with the image.

The installation process can be automated by running the commands in the script .infrastructure/scripts/provision.sh. This script will guide you through the installation process, making it easier to get started with Docker on your GCP project.

Building and pushing images is a crucial part of working with Docker on Google Cloud Platform. You can build an image using a Dockerfile, which is a text document that contains instructions for Docker to build an image.

To build an image using a Dockerfile, you'll need to create a new directory, navigate into it, and create a Dockerfile with the following contents: FROM alpine, COPY quickstart.sh /, and CMD ["/quickstart.sh"].

You can then run the following command to build the image: gcloud builds submit --region=us-west2 --tag us-west2-docker.pkg.dev/project-id/quickstart-docker-repo/quickstart-image:tag1.

Alternatively, you can use a Cloud Build config file to build the image. This file instructs Cloud Build to perform tasks based on your specifications, including building the image and pushing it to Artifact Registry.

Here are the steps to create a Cloud Build config file:

Once you've built the image, you can push it to a registry. To do this, you'll need to tag the image with its target path in Container Registry, including the gcr.io registry host and the project ID.

Here are the steps to push an image to a registry:

The Container Registry is a private and secure alternative to Docker's public central registry. It's a part of the Google Cloud Platform and can be found in the Cloud Console UI under Container Registry.

To use the Container Registry, you need to enable the Google Container Registry API. This will give you access to a ready-to-use private registry as part of your GCP project.

You can find the Container Registry in the Cloud Console UI under Container Registry. Once you have it enabled, you can use it to store and manage your Docker images.

To push an image to the Container Registry, you need to tag it with its target path in Container Registry, including the gcr.io registry host and the project ID. For example, if your project ID is my-project, the target path would be gcr.io/my-project/your-image-name.

Here's a summary of the steps to push an image to the Container Registry:

Here's an example of how to tag an image:

```

docker tag my-nginx gcr.io/my-project/my-nginx

```

And here's an example of how to push the image to the registry:

```

docker push gcr.io/my-project/my-nginx

```

Security and Permissions are crucial when working with Google Cloud Platform and Docker. IAM stands for Identity and Access Management and is used for managing permissions on GCP.

Permissions are fine-grained for particular actions, such as storage.buckets.create to "Create Cloud Storage buckets". Roles combine a selection of permissions, like the Cloud Storage Admin role, which has permissions like storage.buckets.create.

To manage permissions, you can find a full overview of all permissions in the Permissions Reference and all roles under Understanding roles > Predefined roles. Roles can be assigned through the Cloud Console IAM UI by editing the corresponding user.

You can assign roles to service accounts, like the service account "user" docker-php-tutorial-deployment@pl-dofroscra-p.iam.gserviceaccount.com. This service account needs roles like Storage Admin, Secret Manager Admin, Compute Admin, Service Account User, and IAP-secured Tunnel User.

Here are the roles that need to be assigned to the service account:

You can assign these roles using the gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding command, which takes the project name, service account email, and role ID as arguments.