Google Cloud Build - Hello World

I have been exploring Google Cloud Build recently and this post is a simple introduction to this product. You can think of it as a tool that enables automation of deployments. This post though will not go as far as automating deployments, instead just covering the basics of what it involves in getting a pipeline going. A follow up post will show a continuous deployment pipeline for a java application. 

Steps

The basic steps to set-up a Cloud Build in your GCP project is explained here. Assuming that the Cloud Build has been set-up, I will be using this github project to create a pipeline.

Cloud pipeline is typically placed as a yaml configuration in a file named by convention as "cloudbuild.yaml". The pipeline is described as a series of steps, each step runs in a docker container and the name of the step points to the docker image. So for eg. a step which echo's a message looks like this:

Here the name "bash" points to the docker image named "bash" in docker hub

The project does not need to be configured in Google Cloud Build to run it, instead a utility called "cloud-build-local" can be used for running the build file. 

git clone git@github.com:bijukunjummen/hello-cloud-build.git
cd hello-cloud-build
cloud-build-local .

Alright, now to add a few more steps. Consider a build file with 2 steps: Here the two steps will run serially, first Step A, then Step B. A sample output looks like this on my machine:

Starting Step #0 - "A"
Step #0 - "A": Already have image (with digest): bash
Step #0 - "A": Step A
Finished Step #0 - "A"
2021/08/10 12:50:23 Step Step #0 - "A" finished
Starting Step #1 - "B"
Step #1 - "B": Already have image (with digest): bash
Step #1 - "B": Step B
Finished Step #1 - "B"
2021/08/10 12:50:25 Step Step #1 - "B" finished
2021/08/10 12:50:26 status changed to "DONE"

Concurrent Steps

A little more complex, say if I wanted to execute a few steps concurrently, the way to do it is using waitFor property of a step.

Here "waitFor" value of "-" indicates the start of the build, so essentially Step A and B will run concurrently and an output in my machine looks like this:

Starting Step #1 - "B"
Starting Step #0 - "A"
Step #1 - "B": Already have image (with digest): bash
Step #0 - "A": Already have image (with digest): bash
Step #1 - "B": Step B
Step #0 - "A": Step A
Finished Step #1 - "B"
2021/08/10 12:54:21 Step Step #1 - "B" finished
Finished Step #0 - "A"
2021/08/10 12:54:21 Step Step #0 - "A" finished

One more example where Step A is executed first and then Step B and Step C concurrently:

Passing Data

A root volume at path "/workspace" carries through the build, so if a step wants to pass data to another step then it can be passed through this "/workspace" folder. Here Step A is writing to a file and Step B is reading from the same file.

Conclusion

This covers the basics of the steps in a Cloud Build configuration file. In a subsequent post I will be using these to create a pipeline to deploy a java based application to Google Cloud Run.