GCP on Lin's Blog

Hosting a Static Website on GCP Storage - Getting Started on My First Try

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 09:20:02 +0000

Want to host a static website on Google Cloud Storage but don’t know where to start? Every time I upload files to Google Cloud Storage to share with friends, I have to click “Public,” which is a hassle, right? I looked into this for a few days because of a work requirement. At first I thought I just needed to set up the domain and share the files, but after researching, I found there are many little tricks. For example, having to make every uploaded file public is really annoying, but you can set a bucket so that new uploads are public by default. You can even set the default file names for the index and 404 pages. And even the SSL problem that I thought had no solution: the official docs offer a good workaround!

Handling Insufficient Balance for GCP Automatic Payments

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 10:19:02 +0000

Because the credit card I registered with GCP is a “VISA debit card,” the automatic monthly payment can sometimes fail when my bank balance is too low. GCP’s current approach is to send an email reminder after a failed charge and retry the charge one day later. If it still fails, GCP asks you to log in to the GCP console and pay manually once you’ve fixed the problem. I had never had trouble paying through the GCP console before, but this time the flow seems to have changed. Following their link takes you to the billing page, but you can’t actually make a payment there. Even when you find the right payment button, using Chrome Canary causes a frontend problem where the payment dialog keeps loading forever. You have to switch to the regular version of Chrome to pay successfully. I’m really curious what the latest and greatest technology behind this payment dialog is…

Tips for Uploading Large Files to Google Cloud Storage

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 10:00:49 +0000

I back up my data regularly. I copy my Google, Facebook, and Evernote data, photo albums, and more to Google Cloud Storage. Uploading through the browser always meant dealing with slow speeds, and if the connection dropped, I had to resend a 10 GB file from the beginning. So I read through the official documentation and found some handy tips for uploading large files to Google Cloud Storage, which I’m sharing here.

This post covers:

How to have GCP Storage verify a file's MD5 checksum
How to enable resumable uploads, so a dropped connection doesn't mean starting over
How to push your upload speed to the limit with parallel transfers

Enabling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) on Google Cloud Storage

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 13:50:59 +0000

Recently I’ve been teaching a club class how to build small games with Phaser. Many of the assets need to be used by students on CodePen, so I needed web storage that supports CORS to host them. As I was brainstorming, I thought of Google Cloud Storage: it’s cheap, and you can bind it to your own domain!

By default, Google Cloud Storage doesn’t support Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). But you can enable CORS on a specific bucket with gsutil (the Google Cloud Storage CLI tool)!