How can I use Google Cloud Storage in a container deployed to the Google Container Engine?

Question

Background

I have a Java-Servlet application that runs in tomcat, which runs in a docker container, which runs on the Google Container Engine. It is no big deal to extend the docker image so that it also fetches and refreshes the certificates (there is only a single pod per domain, so no inter-pod-communication is required). However certbot needs to save it's credentials and certificates somewhere and the pod's filesystem seems like a bad idea because it is ephemeral and won't survive a pod restart. According to the table with storage options. Google Cloud storage seems like a good idea, because it is very cheap, the volume is auto sized and I can also access it from multiple locations (I don't need to create one disk for each individual pod which will be pretty much empty) including the web-UI (the later may be useful for debugging) and throuput and latency are really no issue for this usecase.

Question

I created a bucket and now I want to access that bucket from a container. Google describes here and yet again here that I can mount the buckets using FUSE. What they don't mention is that you need to make the container privileged to use FUSE which does not feel quite right for me. Additionally I need to install the whole google cloud SDK and set up authentication (which I am going to store... where?). But actually I don't really need fuse access. Just downloading the config on startup and uploading the config after each refresh would be enough. So something that works similar to SCP would do...

There is gcloud which can access files from command line without the need for FUSE, but it still needs to be initialized somehow with credentials.

Here user326502 mentions

It won't work with zero configuration if the App Engine SDK is installed [..] As long as the container lives on a Google Compute Engine instance you can access any bucket in the same project.

He explains further that I magically don't need any credentials when I just use the library. I guess I could write my own copy application with those libraries, but it feels like the fact that I did not find something like this from anyone on the net makes me feel that I am completely on the wrong track.

So how would one actually access a google cloud storage bucket from within a container (as simple as possible)?

Answer 1

You can use gsutil to copy from the bucket to the local disk when the container starts up.

If you are running in Google Container Engine, gsutil will use the service account of the cluster's nodes (to do this, you'll need to specify the storage-ro scope when you create your cluster).

Alternatively, you can create a new service account, generating a JSON key. In Container Engine, you can store that key as a Kubernetes secret, and then mount the secret in the pod that needs to use it. From that pod, you'd configure gsutil to use the service account by calling gcloud auth activate-service-account--key-file /path/to/my/mounted/secret-key.json