Sandbox environments in google cloud

Tools to help with Sandbox Environments

A manual process to build sandboxes is always an option.  There are a couple of alternatives..a popular one is Buddy (some highlights below). This post will highlight what you gain by using a tool as opposed to the manual process  – and what sandbox generating tools are capable of.

1. Buddy can create disposable environments for a variety of runtimes including java, asp.net, lamp…- for dev, staging, QA and clients previews.
2. It delivers a working website for every branch.
3. It also automates deployments to any server – including GCP compute engine VMs.

Buddy based Deployment to GCE (Google Compute Engine)

Example pipeline:

The project is Java/Maven. The application in the form of a .war file is uploaded to the GCE and restarted with an SSH script on every push to the repository:

Buddy based Deployment to GAE (Google App Engine)

Google App Engine lets developers upload, build and serve web and mobile backends on Google’s infrastructure (similar to Azure App Services or AWS’ Elastic Beanstalk).

Example pipeline:

With Buddy, you can automate deployments to GAE using a dedicated file transfer action. Just like in previous actions, you can upload your package automatically on push to the selected branch or a wildcard pattern, on demand, or recurrently at a specific time.

Summary

Rapidly spinning up a sandbox with a ready to test application is a common cloud use case. Manually building sandboxes is time consuming and not feature rich. Tools such as buddy can provide you with automated sandbox generation as well as rich notification features around the process. They are cloud agnostic and can work with AWS,  Azure or GCP.