Deploying Metabase on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

I’m sure there are multiple ways to do this, but this is what I used to get Metabase up and running y’all with Google BigQuery as my reporting database.

GCloud Setup

Make sure you have gcloud setup (developer tools):

Installing Google Cloud SDK | Cloud SDK Documentation

and that you’ve done the login, but also that you’ve configured Docker to authenticate with whatever mechanism you’ve chosen.

gcloud auth login
gcloud auth configure-docker

Deploy Metabase to Google Cloud Registry

Metabase docker images are on Dockerhub here. However, I wanted these in Google Cloud Registry for performance and reliability reasons.

https://hub.docker.com/r/metabase/metabase/tags

Pull the docker image locally as follows:

docker pull metabase/metabase:latest

Tag the docker image with the following:

• hostname — eu.gcr.io
• projectname — krustysfunhouse
• Tag — metabase

docker tag metabase/metabase:latest eu.gcr.io/krustysfunhouse/metabase

Deploy the Docker image to Google Cloud Registry with the following

docker push eu.gcr.io/krustysfunhouse/metabase:latest

Create a Compute Engine instance, specify the GCR image (min 1GB of RAM required).

Console Login

Then login from gcloud via the console with the following:

gcloud beta compute ssh --zone "europe-west2-c" "metabasereporting" --project "krustysfunhouse"

You’ll have a Container Optimized OS by default, more info on that here:

https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/docs

Setting up Metabase

Metabase runs as a Java app and starts-up on port 3000. If you want to get into installing Nginx or GCP load Balancing that’s a different story.

Add a new Firewall Rule to allow traffic to access tcp:3000 for now — example below. Then add this “name” to the machine VM instance as a network tag.

That’s about it. Welcome to Super Metabase land.

I work for HWIntegral as a CTO, architect and engineer, you can find out more here:

Data Strategy Help - HW Integral