12 Days of Integrations — Google Cloud Platform

It’s that time of year again… The leaves have fallen from the trees, every department store is playing “All I Want for Christmas is You” on a loop, and I can finally justify wearing that hand-knit beanie I bought on Etsy (even though I live in California).

To celebrate, Sentry is highlighting twelve of our many integrations with an ornament hung with care each day on our festive Sen-Tree. We hope you return every day to enjoy these GIFs with your holiday feast, egg nog, Manischewitz, or pour-over artisan coffee.

Our tenth featured integration is Google Cloud Platform.

A good way to impress people and show them that you’re, like, good at engineering is to throw words like PaaS around. It indicates you’re in the know about infrastructure trends. Don’t misspell it though. And also don’t get it confused with Paas, the old school brand of Easter egg dye. Thankfully, Wikipedia links to a “Platform as a service” article from the top of their Paas egg dye article just in case you do.

An even better way to impress people is to not assume Google Cloud Platform is a PaaS when it can be a PaaS or an IaaS or something else entirely depending on how you’re using it. Even if you’ve written this really sweet joke about Easter eggs in a blog post and can’t think of a better opening.

There are two different ways that Sentry is integrated with Google Cloud Platform. For one, we use GCP ourselves, trusting them for a secure, compliant, reliable, and scalable cloud experience. We wrote a detailed blog post in October about the process of migrating to their services. To quote that post:

It was the first weekend of July. And because we’re in San Francisco, it was so foggy and windy that we may as well have been huddled inside an Antarctic research station trying to avoid The Thing.

The operations team had gathered at Sentry HQ to finish migrating our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform. The previous two and a half months had been tireless (and tiring), but we finished that day by switching over sentry.io’s DNS records and watched as traffic slowly moved from our colo provider in Texas to us-central1 in Iowa…

No matter how long we spent projecting resource usage within Google Compute Engine, we never would have predicted our increased throughput. Due to GCP’s default microarchitecture, Haswell, we noticed an immediate performance increase across our CPU-intensive workloads, namely source map processing. The operations team spent the next few weeks making conservative reductions in our infrastructure, and still managed to cut our infrastructure costs by roughly 20%. No fancy cloud technology, no giant infrastructure undertaking – just new rocks that were better at math.

You can read the rest here if you’re interested.

Beyond our own usage, Sentry is also (as of today) directly available through the Developer tools section of GCP’s Cloud Launcher marketplace. This provides a simple and direct way to get moving with Sentry if you’re currently using GCP, though it doesn’t add anything to the experience (at least not yet) if you’re already using Sentry.

With Sentry + Google Cloud Platform, the merry bells will keep ringing Happy Holidays, SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS to you.