Seth's questions

I'm trying to figure out the lowest hassle way to provision 24x locally attached SSDs as a large logical volume with low-value data. I'm using them as a hot-set cache for data who's master state (about a petabyte) resides in S3, so I care more about performance, complexity of maintenance, and downtime more than lost data. Nothing will linger in the hot data set for more than a couple days, and its all easy to recreate from S3 anyway.

• Medium large instance: 32x vCPUs, 120GB RAM, Skylake
• 24x locally attached SSDs @ 375GB each = 9TB total
• Hosted on Google Cloud (GCP)
• Debian 10 (Buster)
• Access is ~4x heavier on read than write
• High number of concurrent users (human and machine) with pretty random access patterns, and very hungry for I/O.
• 90% of files are larger than 10MB

I'm thinking RAID 5 is out of the question, no chance I'm going to wait for manual rebuilds. I'm inclined toward either RAID 0, RAID 10, or.... maybe this is actually a case for a simple LVM pool with no RAID at all? Do I really lose anything by going that relatively simpler route in this case?

My ideal solution would have each subdir (I have one self contained dataset per subdir) of / completely contained on a single disk (I can fit maybe 10 subdirs on each drive). If a drive failed, I'd have a temporary outage of the subdirs/datasets on that drive, but an easy to reason about set of "these data sets are redownloading and not available". Then I'd just rebuild the missing data sets from S3 on a new drive. I suspect LVM jbods (not sure of exactly the right word for this?) might come closest to replicating this behavior.

I have a 64-core Windows 2019 Server. Several of my user's have badly written programs that never envisioned being on a shared machine, and use 100% CPU on all cores while doing no useful work with them. They're impacting all users, and as a form of damage control, I'd like to have at most 4 cores available to each logged in user (or 4 cores available to each app/process would be fine too). Is there a way to implement this on Windows Server 2019?

My org is almost exclusively Linux and Mac based. We have all of our internal services configured to use our GSuite logins for identity and auth.

Now we need to use a Windows application, and I'd like to host it in GCP using Windows Server 2019 rather than maintaining on-prem windows desktop hardware (we're a distributed team). I've setup an AD instance, but I'd really like to allow users to sign on using GSuite logins, maintaining continuity our existing Google Identity based SSO setup.

I've read through: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/federating-gcp-with-active-directory-introduction, but it seems to be a solution for using Active Directory as the Master and syncing TO Google Identity. I want the reverse, I'd like Google Identity to be the master, and Active Directory uses it as the identity provider (ideally without syncing :-P).

How can I go about setting up Active Directory so it uses Google Identity as the identity provider?