google cloud engine instance is deleting installed packages

0
votes

i am running a google cloud compute instance as a debian jessie machine. i installed apache and java via apt-get and tomcat via wget from the tomcat repository. the instance is running and not stopped. ever since i installed the packages, i notice that at one point, some of the features i installed are removed. in tomcat, the manager directory is deleted and with it the capability to remote manage the server via the web interface. also, a WAR i deployed is also deleted. why is this happening? i need to constantly remove and re-install the tomcat and re-deploy the WAR file.

is this something related to a snapshot i took of the instance? though when i played with this snapshot, manager application was available under tomcat ROOT.

this is very frustrating. any ideas?

1
installationinstancegoogle-cloud-platform

1 Answers

0
votes

There might be few reasons for that:

  1. You might be using instance with LocalSSD disk. These disks are ephemeral and data is lost on stop/start. If this is the case, take the snapshot of the disk and restore it to new disk which is iether PD or SSD.
  2. Automatic software updates are configured by default on GCE. This can sometimes cause this kind of problems
  3. File system corruption. Run fsck to check and fix
  4. Some sort of backup/disaster-recovery software that went wrong

[1] Compute Engine Disk Types Reference

[2] Operating systems that update automatically on GCE

[3] fsck reference