Théis Bazin

Théis Bazin

I’m interested in making interactions with computers for music creation more stimulating.

On using Google Cloud Engine

1 minute read

Firewall rules

Source: GCE Default firewall rules

Egress rules on instances meant for deny type of rules, since all outbound traffic is enabled by default on GCE instances:

All networks, whether a project’s default network or a manually created network, have the following implied rules. These rules cannot be changed or deleted, but rules with a higher priority can override them.

  • A default “allow egress” rule. Allows all egress connections. Rule has a priority of 65535.
  • A default “deny ingress” rule. Deny all ingress connection. Rule has a priority of 65535

Allowing all egress traffic by default is apparently common practice on servers, under the assumption that the code running on the server is - to itself - trustable.

Drives and instances

Information given by Nicola Montecchio.

  • Using an SSD over a hard drive does not significantly increase costs
  • GPU instances cost a lot, even when idle, so turn them off as often as possible
  • On throughput:
    • Much higher throughput (On GCE disk performance) on large drives, thus it is more efficient to create the instance with a small internal drive AND create a (possibly shared) large SSD (e.g. 400Gb) and mount it on the instance.
    • in that case the drive has to be created as a blank drive, then be attached to the instance. see the procedure in the references for mounting and formatting the drive
    • the created disk can be used in read-only mode by several instances simultaneously
    • also has the benefit of allowing to shutdown the instance and still access the files on the drive: an idle drive does not cost much

Mounting drive

Code available to format drive on this page: Adding and formatting drives

Properly creating the /mnt/disks folder

The code given on this Google page omits the creation of the /mnt/disks folder, which could result in bugs regarding the file permissions.

Code to properly create this folder and set the permissions:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/disks
$ sudo chmod -R a+rx /mnt/disks  # `+x` necessary to enter and perform ls on folder

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