Unleashing the Power of Filestore in GCP: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction to Filestore

Filestore makes it possible to migrate applications to the cloud quickly and easily by avoiding the need for rewriting or rearchitecting.

Applications running on Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances, Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, external datastores like Google Cloud VMware Engine, or your on-premises machines can all use Filestore instances, which are fully managed NFS file servers on Google Cloud. Are you unsure about the best storage product for you? Find out more about our services for storing.

Why Filestore?

Block, file, and object storage are the three primary forms of data storage that Google Cloud provides.

Filestore is a type of file storage that allows several concurrent application instances to access the same file system at once. This multiwriter access support, for instance, provides a strong substitute for block storage solutions that only support single write access, like Persistent Disk, for users of Google Kubernetes Engine.

Service Tiers

Filestore provides several service tiers with different features, capacities, and performance levels. Every service tier is designed with particular use cases in mind:

• Basic tier – File sharing, web hosting, software development, and fundamental AI.
• Enterprise tier – Workloads that are mission-critical and demand high availability.
• Zonal tier – Large data sets, advanced AI, media rendering and transcoding, HPC, batch computing, and EDA

Protocol Support

Filestore supports any client that is NFSv3-compatible and operates on the Filestore instance using the NFSv3 file system protocol.

Connectivity

Any client connected to the same VPC network, including shared VPC networks, can establish a connection with a Filestore instance. Moreover, you can use Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect to establish a connection with clients on distant networks, like an on-premises computer.

Reliability

The reliability of Filestore instances is covered in the ensuing sections.

• Zonal instances

Basic and regional levels Filestore instances are zonal resources that safeguard your data from equipment failure by providing in-zone storage redundancy. On the other hand, the instances that are located in a zone become unavailable for the period that the zone is down if an outage or data center maintenance causes the zone to go down.

Even in the event that the region experiences one or more zone failures, you are still able to create basic- and zonal-tier instances for any operational zone.

• Regional instances

Filestore instances at the enterprise tier are local resources. Enterprise-tier instances keep serving data and taking in new writes even in the event of a zone failure, so clients are not made aware of the failure. Furthermore, Filestore complies with NFS’s stringent consistency policy. Filestore does not provide an acknowledgment when a client writes data until the modification is maintained, even in the event of a zone failure, so that subsequent reads yield the accurate data.

The Filestore Cloud Console or API functions might not be accessible for a few hours during a zone failure. While NFS data access is unaffected by enterprise instances, you might notice a slight drop in performance while the zone heals. Additionally, if a region is having zone failures, you are unable to create an enterprise instance there.

Key Features

• Scales to meet needs of high-performance workloads

Filestore provides applications with low latency storage operations. Filestore offers capacity up to 100 TB, throughput of 25 GB/s, and 920K IOPS for workloads that are latency sensitive, such as high performance computing, data analytics, or other metadata-intensive applications.

• 99% regional availability SLA supports enterprise apps

Filestore Enterprise is designed for mission-critical applications (like SAP) that need to be available in multiple regions in order to function normally during a zonal outage. Get a head start on your cloud migration by not having to rewrite your apps.

• Protect your data with backups and snapshots

Filestore makes data protection simple by providing instantaneous backups and snapshots. Take snapshots of your instances whenever necessary, schedule regular backups, or backup the file share’s data and metadata. In terms of data recovery, you should be able to retrieve most or all of your data from a previous snapshot recovery point in under ten minutes.

• Scale GCVE datastore capacity independently from compute

As NFS datastores with Google Cloud VMware Engine, Filestore High Scale and Filestore Enterprise have received VMware certification. To satisfy the compute and storage needs of your storage-intensive virtual machines, appropriately scale your vCPUs and storage capacity separately. Scale Filestore from TBs to PBs for the capacity-hungry virtual machines and take advantage of vSAN for low latency requirements.

• Filestore offers three performance tiers:

Supported Regions

For more information related to supported regions and zones, please click on the following link.
Regions and zones  |  Filestore  |  Google Cloud

Steps to Perform Filestore Lab

1. Login to GCP console.
2. Create VPC and 2 Subnets and allow the firewall rule.
3. Go to the menu and click on VPC network and again click on VPC networks.

4. Click on create VPC network.

5. Give the name to the VPC and select custom under subnet creation mode. Create the 2 subnets.

6. Give the name to the subnet and the IP range as 10.0.0.0/24. Click on done.

7. Add one more subnet. Click on add subnet and add the details as above.  Put the IP address as 10.0.1.0/24.

8. Add all the firewall rules as below.

9. Click on create.  This will create your custom VPC with 2 subnets.

Creating Firewall Rule

1. Search Firewall in the search bar and click on Create Firewall rule.

2. Once you click on create firewall rule, fill the details as below –
   1. Name – filestore
   2. Targets – Specified target tags
   3. Target tags – filestore
   4. IPV4 sources ranges – 0.0.0.0/0
   5. Protocols and Ports – Allow all.
   6. Click on create

Create Filestore

1. Click on search bar and search for Filestore and click on create instance.

2. Please fill the details as below –
   1. Name – Filestore
   2. Sample instance – Basic
   3. Storage type – HDD
   4. Region – asia-east1
   5. VPC Network – Select the VPC that we have created
   6. configure your file share – mynfs
   7. keep the rest as it is and click on create.

Create 2 Virtual Machine Instances

1. Click on the menu, select Compute Engine and select VM instances and select create instances.

2. Create 2 instances with the names as below
   1. Name – Instance1 and instance2
   2. Machine Type – N1
   3. Boot Disk – select OS as CentOS
   4. Firewall – Allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic
   5. Under Advanced options –
   6. Network tags – select the firewall rule we created – filestore.
   7. Under Edit Network Interface
   8. Network – Demo
   9. Subnetwork – Select subnet1 and click on done.
   10. click on create.

3. Once you create both the instances it will look as below –

4. Now ssh both the instances and run the below commands –

5. Now copy the mount point from the filestore we have created, and this will be used in the commands.

6. Now run the following commands on both the instances –

7. Run the below command on both the vms

create 3 text file in instance 1 and just ls in the instance 2, all the 3 files will be shown.

This means that we have successfully installed the filestore in both the instances.

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