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How Google Cloud Build helps microservices build automation
Google Cloud Build has the potential to play a valuable and reliable role in CI/CD pipelines for microservices development. Learn how Cloud Build can help.
With microservices architecture becoming commonplace in IT organizations, Git repositories are the lifeblood of software development. In enterprises, large teams of developers contribute to and collaborate on code from remote locations, version-control all their contributions and centrally access them in GitHub or a similar repository management tool.
A typical microservices build in Git requires that developers take a piece of code from a Git repository, package it as a container and make that container image available for deployment. With the many steps involved in this process, build automation is a key way to facilitate delivery of microservices via a CI/CD pipeline. Tools like Google Cloud Build, AWS CodeBuild and Azure Pipelines make it easy to automate these builds.
Let's look specifically at how Google Cloud Build helps eliminate work for developers, as well as some of the platforms you can integrate with it to enhance its deployment capabilities.
Why Google Cloud Build?
It's easy to create a minimalist version of a new app in a sandbox environment. Tools like Gradle are perfect for local, sandbox environments. However, you need a build automation tool that can handle the complexities of the cloud once that app moves beyond the sandbox into staging or deployment.
Cloud Build enables easy build automation, especially when deploying to a server in Google Cloud or managing builds on premises in a data center. Cloud Build users define the various details for a build in a configuration file. With a few tweaks to the config file, the user can carry out multiple changes at once and automate complex workflows, making the process easy to manage and scale.
Cloud Build also executes tests and deploys to target cloud servers, but it's not the best approach for complex deployments when used on its own. For that, consider integrating Cloud Build with Spinnaker, an open source CD platform designed for high-velocity software change releases.
Always watching
Cloud Build includes build triggers in deployed artifacts that watch for changes in the source code. Whenever it detects a code change, Cloud Build automatically initiates another build, performs testing and deploys the updated code to the target server. This capability is huge in terms of ease of use and automation, especially when software developers make frequent code releases.
