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Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#41

Don't use AppEngine. I migrated Homejoy off of AppEngine in 2014 and I can't recommend the platform for any reason whatsoever. It's slow, expensive, not based on OSS, and not particularly stable. Bits of it (urlfetch, search, etc) would go down for hours at a time and you're basically hosed until they fix it. I think Heroku is usable with a similar level of effort -- and you have a much easier migration path to somet…

I appreciate the input as I am trying to choose a hosting provider.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#42

What version of node is supported? Currently in all other languages they are usually a major version behind (in everything).

You can specify whatever version of Node.js you want to use in the engines section of your package.json: https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/resources/runtime#engines

Frustrating that it doesn't specify how it gets those versions. Is it always direct from the node folks so it's going to always have all versions or do they have their own cache?

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can specify whatever version of Node.js you want to use in the engines section of your package.json: https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/resources/runtime#engines

Frustrating that it doesn't specify how it gets those versions. Is it always direct from the node folks so it's going to always have all versions or do they have their own cache?

Reading the source code of the docker container they use (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/nodejs-docker/blob/ma...) it seems like it's reading the available versions from an URL (http://storage.googleapis.com/gae_node_packages/node_version...) which points to some Google hosted storage. So I'm guessing they have some process to update this list after a new release and also caches the versions themselves.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#45

Don't use AppEngine. I migrated Homejoy off of AppEngine in 2014 and I can't recommend the platform for any reason whatsoever. It's slow, expensive, not based on OSS, and not particularly stable. Bits of it (urlfetch, search, etc) would go down for hours at a time and you're basically hosed until they fix it. I think Heroku is usable with a similar level of effort -- and you have a much easier migration path to somet…

You raise some good points. If App Engine does not work for your project, there is always Container Engine (Which is hosted Kubernetes, so 100% OSS) and Compute Engine (plain old VMs).

2014 App Engine is also different from 2016 App Engine, hopefully a lot of the problems you had have been addressed.

(I work for Google Cloud Platform)

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#46

Don't use AppEngine. I migrated Homejoy off of AppEngine in 2014 and I can't recommend the platform for any reason whatsoever. It's slow, expensive, not based on OSS, and not particularly stable. Bits of it (urlfetch, search, etc) would go down for hours at a time and you're basically hosed until they fix it. I think Heroku is usable with a similar level of effort -- and you have a much easier migration path to somet…

I agree. I built a huge python app on AppEngine back in 2009-2012 called Vroomtrap which was an app for tracking speed traps. The BigTable data store wasn't ever designed for multiple inequality queries (e.g. where X is between two points AND Y is between two points -- basically a bounding box) I ended up creating a GeoHashing function but I would have been better off not wasting so much time going down the AppEngine route in the first place. The only thing I have on app engine is a URL shorter which was a 3 hour project that I had to do for GetAround.

Last year I moved a personal project (https://www.gitignore.io) over to Heroku and it's been awesome. My whole application runs in memory on a single free dyno. the service uptime has been great and Heroku's pipeline system (Which is basically like Amazon's internal pipeline system) is really good for testing in staging and then going to production.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#47
I used google app engine for a project with very specific requirements - the client wanted an application for internal use that didn't have any ongoing costs (sign off) and would look after itself for a couple of years.

The platform has a lot of quirks, and I had to do a lot more learning than I expected to get the fairly simple project done. But once it was up, it did it's thing.

I'd definitely recommend for free hosting internal applications and personal projects that are just for you to use. Just understand that you'll need to shape your application around the wierdnesses of the platform.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#48
post #33

I'm surprised they didn't have it until now...

It's not really that surprising. They started with Python because the inventor of Python worked there. Then they added Java because... well it's Java. Then they added GoLang because they invented it. Then they added PHP because most of the internet still runs on that. So Node is the next logical step... or Ruby probably would have worked as well.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#49

is anyone using node.js in enterprise? because everyone seems to be convinced that the enterprise companies are going to uproot all the network of partners, developers, vendors, and billions of dollars of investment made over the past decade? Like it or not, JVM pretty much rules the enterprise space and there's just no way to do it another way. Literally, you will be turned away because you told the IT department th…

it irks me when a 19 year old CTO on the autistic spectrum

This added literally nothing to your post aside from a nice dose of ableism. This is HN, not reddit (if that still means anything these days)

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#50

Don't use AppEngine. I migrated Homejoy off of AppEngine in 2014 and I can't recommend the platform for any reason whatsoever. It's slow, expensive, not based on OSS, and not particularly stable. Bits of it (urlfetch, search, etc) would go down for hours at a time and you're basically hosed until they fix it. I think Heroku is usable with a similar level of effort -- and you have a much easier migration path to somet…

Apologies you had a bad experience. There's no doubt the original App Engine had some... quirks.

You may want to take a look at Managed VMs. All of the new runtimes are based on Docker images, are entirely extensible, and don't require the use of the original App Engine APIs:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/

You can use whatever Database or NPM modules you want.

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