Choose 1: First class support for non-containerised deploys to Compute Engine, or fix logging agent support for Container-optimised OS

benhutchison commented 2 years ago

TL;DR

I want to automatically build and deploy a long-running daemon-type service to a small Compute Engine VM.

I also want to be able to take advantage of stackdriver logging and monitoring, it's a major piece of the GCP value prop.

I would prefer to use docker but I'll build a native image if that what it takes to work.

GCP seems to be in the middle of transitioning from an older, mem-leaky stack driver log agent, that basically doesn't work on small VMs, to a hopefully more resource-efficient new Ops Agent.

But the new ops agent isnt available in Container Optimised OS, and no comms on when or why, or if it matters to them.. https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/ops-agent/issues/325

This problem is severe enough for me that I'd transition to a native VM to be able to ditch the old agent, because it regularly crashes my machines. But when I look for guidance for how to build native vms from github actions, there isnt any!?

I feel like different parts of google are supporting different platforms.

Detailed design

No response

Additional information

No response

sethvargo commented 2 years ago

Hi @benhutchison

Thank you for opening an issue. This GitHub Action installs and configures the gcloud CLI tool. Did you have a question about the gcloud CLI?

For Cloud Operations (formerly Stackdriver) support, see https://cloud.google.com/stackdriver/docs/getting-support.
For Compute Engine support, see https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/getting-support.

benhutchison commented 2 years ago

So my issue was to highlight the mismatch between different parts of the GCP offering.

In this repo, at https://github.com/google-github-actions/setup-gcloud/tree/master/example-workflows/gce there are example workflows to publish from Github actions to Compute Engine, but they only cover dockerized deploy to a Container Optimized OS VM. However, if you do that, you'll find (for a small VM) that it is unstable because the older stackdriver agent eats up the memory.
Meanwhile, the Cloud Operations folks aren't supporting Container Optimized OS for the newer fixed stackdriver agent.

As an end user, I just want at compute platform that "Just Works" and that all parts of GCP agree to support, I have a slight preference for Docker, but I'd be willing to trade that off for stability.

bharathkkb commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback @benhutchison, we will be adding example workflows to cover more use cases in the future.

For deploying the a regular VM instance you can replace the following steps with a gcloud command from https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/create-start-instance#gcloud.

google-github-actions / setup-gcloud