VMware Aria Automation February (8.11.1) – Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Storage Buckets

With February 2023 Aria Automation launch, the cloud administrator can now create an Aria Automation Templates configured with GCP Storage buckets elements that allows Cloud Administrators to create a service where users can use self-service to quickly and easily request to create and manage GCP storage buckets resources, that can help organize and control access to data stored in these storage buckets.

Aria Automation storage bucket support includes the creation of Single-Regional / Multi-Regional / Dual-Regional location type storage buckets, restricted public access, and encryption that can be configured using the GCP Storage Bucket element within the Aria Automation Template.

The following are the required properties at a minimum for a GCP storage bucket cloud templates.

• Storage Bucket Name – The bucket name. Please make sure to check the bucket name requirements for more details : GCP Cloud Storage Buckets
• Location Type – Choose where you want to store your data, which can be one of these location types :
  • SINGLE_REGION: A specific geographic place, such as Toronto
  • DUAL_REGION: A specific pair of regions, such as Tokyo and Osaka that must reside in the same geographic area, for example like ASIA region.
  • MULTI_REGION: A Large geographic area, such as US, ASIA and EU, that contain two or more geographic places.
• If the location Type you decide to use is either DUAL_REGION or MULTI_REGION – then the regionId property would now be deemed MANDATORY within the storage bucket element in the template. Please be aware that there are different values of the regionId, depending on the location Type you choose. As of now the available GCP region IDs are [ ASIA, EU and US ] Please make sure to check the Bucket Locations page for more details: GCP Bucket Locations
• If the location Type you decide to use is DUAL_REGION – then the location property along with regionId would also be deemed MANDATORY as will see later in our blog example below.
• Storage Class – Choose your bucket storage class. You can choose between [ STANDARD, NEARLINE, COLDLINE, ARCHIVE, REGIONAL, MULTI_REGIONAL, DURABLE_REDUCED_AVAILABILITY ] all of which offered by GCP Cloud Storage based on your storage requirements. Please make sure to check the GCP Storage Classes Guide to see which Storage Class fits your needs: GCP Storage Classes

Also creating storage buckets with restricted public access and encrypted by Customer-Managed Encryption Keys “CMEK” is also supported within the template storage buckets element, there are however some prerequisites that you will need to follow and be aware of as described in the following link

Please note that the customer-managed encryption key when being used, must be located in the same region as the storage bucket being provisioned.

In this blog as an example, we will provision a dual-region Storage Bucket using a STANDARD storage class in the North America geographic area across us-east1 (South Carolina) and us-east4 (Northern Virginia) regions, which are currently supported for creating dual-regions storage buckets based on GCP Documentations GCP Bucket Locations

Requirements

• A Google Cloud Account configured in Aria Automation with us-east1 and us-east4 as allowed regions to provision to.
• Cloud Zones created for us-east1 and us-east4
• Project created with access to us-east1 and us-east4 Cloud Zones.
• A template with a GCP Storage Bucket element with the below IaC yaml.

formatVersion: 1
inputs: {}
resources:
  Cloud_GCP_StorageBucket_1:
    type: Cloud.GCP.StorageBucket
    properties:
      name: tmm-dual-bucket
      storageClass: STANDARD
      locationType: DUAL_REGION
      regionId: US
      locations:
        - US-EAST1
        - US-EAST4

This is a simple demonstration of course but you can always use Aria Automation Template to its fullest potential where you can create inputs for example where the requester can provide the desired name of the storage bucket controlled perhaps by a regex pattern defined within the variable input that enforces the storage naming requirements enforced by GCP so the deployment doesn’t fail due to naming limit/requirement violation.

Once the deployment is completed as we test our template in Aria Automation Assembler.

We can see the result of our Aria Automation deployment in Google Cloud Console under Cloud Storage – Buckets – <Bucket Name> where the Dual-region Storage bucket got created based on our pre-defined template with all its settings like the Location type, Location and the Default Storage Class in the image below.

For more information, please make sure to check the our documentation for more details and more template examples on setting up storage buckets resources with different configuration for Google Cloud Platform.

Now that you are aware of this new capability allowing you to create GCP Storage Buckets from Aria Automation, tell us how will you be planning to use the new functionality and provide your organization users a self-service entitlement to start requesting GCP Storage Buckets from Aria Automation Consumption ( Formerly known vRealize Service Broker )

Let us know in the comments and thank you for reading, if you made it this far.

Until next time, Happy Buckets!

For more info or questions on this, reach out to Maher on Twitter