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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

#101

Post by glaberficken »

hypertexthero wrote: post #76
justinblat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's great to see App Engine getting better! I'm exploring it again after trying the original app a few years back and am enjoying the improved interface and abundant documentation and tutorials. One suggestion: Make a cloud storage product option free up to a few megabytes for hosting small personal sites. Maybe it exists already but I haven't found it.

You can easily run a small personal site on the free tier of GoogleAppEngine. Just google for "app engine static site"

There are a ton of options on what you can achieve inside the free tier. But the simplest one for the use case you seem to require is to author a static html site in a good WYSIWYG html editor and then deploying it as a static site in GAE.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#103

Post by hypertexthero »

glaberficken wrote: post #101
hypertexthero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great to see App Engine getting better! I'm exploring it again after trying the original app a few years back and am enjoying the improved interface and abundant documentation and tutorials. One suggestion: Make a cloud storage product option free up to a few megabytes for hosting small personal sites. Maybe it exists already but I haven't found it.

You can easily run a small personal site on the free tier of GoogleAppEngine. Just google for "app engine static site" There are a ton of options on what you can achieve inside the free tier. But the simplest one for the use case you seem to require is to author a static html site in a good WYSIWYG html editor and then deploying it as a static site in GAE.

Thank you — I will try this!

Edit: My use case is to move a couple of static sites to a host that supports a secure HTTPS connection by default, which App Engine seems to do: " rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/console/using.... I'll try moving one of my sites over and set up SSL with with a certificate from " rel="nofollow">https://letsencrypt.org/>.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#104

Post by ionwake »

pygy_ wrote: post #99
ionwake wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for some reason I can't seem to be able to delete my comment, so I guess there isn't much I can do =(

The edit window is open for one or two hours.

Yes but my NOPROCRAST settings blocked my access for an hour so I wasn't able to.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#105

Post by boulos »

tomh- wrote: post #100
justinblat wrote: post #56

Greetings folks, I'm the PM for Node.js on App Engine. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask me anything!

I have one, how can European individuals use the paid version of any Google cloud services? Last time I checked only commercial entities were allowed to use the paid version.

Warning: IANAL. First, sorry for the pain! As an explanation, it's all about VAT (determining it, collecting it, etc.). Outside of Ireland we dump it on you:

https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602

But specifically:

> “Business” status means that you'd like to see a potential economic benefit from your development activities, for example: using the Google Cloud Platform to develop prototypes or applications with a view to generating revenue in the future. Most software developers -- including affiliates, sole traders, self-employed merchants, partnerships, students and others -- use Google Cloud Platform for business purposes.

I can't help you decide what your VAT on the use of our services would be (this is the realm of accounts and lawyers). I know AWS makes a different decision than we do, and we're very aware of the friction (again, sorry!).

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but again IANAL.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#106

Post by boulos »

sspross wrote: post #94
boulos wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good writeup! I think the main change is that App Engine has really morphed into a "You know, you don't have to use Datastore". Cloud SQL was added precisely because of the issues you raise: being on App Engine meant being in a totally foreign world, and not being able to get out easily. If you were to try again today, you'd take stock Django 1.9 via pip install Django -t lib and using vendoring: https://cloud.google…

It sounds like you know what you're talking about. Would you mind to take a look at my issue/question on the appengine django skeleton[1]. The Problems start after you've pointed your database to cloud sql und start using GAE specific features like task queue etc. [1] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/appengine-django-skel...

For your first question (playing with Cloud SQL) you've got two options. Directly interact with Cloud SQL from your laptop or like you said have a "development MySQL" separate from prod / staging.

Pointing at your Cloud SQL instance (maybe using a staging or development database) can be done in settings.py. The switch between modes let's you specify the IP address for your Cloud SQL instance when you're not on App Engine (which uses a special UNIX domain socket). We also recommend you connect over SSL when doing so outside (see more at the link I provided, or search for cloud sql ssl).

Having a local environment for MySQL is also easy enough depending on your box, but has the usual difficulty of needing to have a good test suite / being populated with useful data. I think it's worthwhile if you can pull it off, but I've seen companies big and small decide its not worth it (and instead use a separate table or database on the same server, maybe as a different user as another line of "don't screw up prod").

Finally, the interaction between Django's development server and the App Engine one isn't great. My response was intended to remind people that if you're not looking to use App Engine specific APIs you really can just get going and almost not notice. But you should be able to run your migrations speaking to Cloud SQL remotely without needing to import say Task Queues. So my workflow was to use manage.py for things like that, while using the dev_appserver when I actually needed to emulate App Engine (as opposed to the Django runserver command).

Does that help?

Edit: I forgot to add that we're working on decoupling the "emulation" of our services so that this kind of interop works better. See https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/beta/emulators... for Datastore and PubSub (and more on the way).

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#107

Post by ralusek »

justinblat wrote: post #56

Greetings folks, I'm the PM for Node.js on App Engine. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask me anything!

This appears to still just be a Managed VM, not really App Engine. What is new? This has been around for a while...

Is there any plan to implement Node fully on GAE?

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#108

Post by atonparker »

We've tried node.js as a managed VM a few times before this. One of the biggest pains is logging. Despite documentation implying that JSON logs are supported (can't find this anymore, maybe it was removed), we still haven't been able to get GCP to read JSON logs. You lose out on all of the nice filtering and request grouping provided by the GCP log viewer.

The issue is here[0] and it would seem they still haven't addressed it a year later.

[0] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#109

Post by eecks »

baudehlo wrote: post #57
eecks wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty awful. Have you found an alternative that you can suggest?

It's really not that hard to run your own servers (VPS) - it's almost always the best way to control things and they scale up way better than most people think. But if you're really scared of that, farm out the entire operations system to a company like vmfarms. They'll take care of everything for you. A bit more expensive but they will hold your hand the entire way.

At the moment I just need something much smaller to be honest.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#110

Post by tomh- »

boulos wrote: post #105
tomh- wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one, how can European individuals use the paid version of any Google cloud services? Last time I checked only commercial entities were allowed to use the paid version.

Warning: IANAL. First, sorry for the pain! As an explanation, it's all about VAT (determining it, collecting it, etc.). Outside of Ireland we dump it on you: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 But specifically: > “Business” status means that you'd like to see a potential economic benefit from your development activities, for example: using the Google Cloud Platform to develop prototypes or applications w…

Thanks for your answer, although its worrying we need to have a lawyer around to see how we can signup without accidentally violating my local country's VAT regulations as a developer who just wants to pay and build stuff :(
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