Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#71

Post by BinaryIdiot »

dlor wrote: post #59
diggan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, we update the available versions constantly and just serve them from GCS to reduce download time. I'll get this documented somewhere. Disclosure: I work on GCP.

Fantastic, thanks!

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#72

Post by jfoster »

justinblat wrote: post #50
mattbillenstein wrote: post #31

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.

Does Google still patch the stack (kernel, web server, interpreter, database, modules, etc.) whenever security issues are discovered? I always thought that was one of the best bits of the App Engine model.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#73

Post by latchkey »

davidjgraph wrote: post #58

So many negative views of GAE, I have to add our, overwhelmingly positive, experience. We were paying $200/month for a load balanced EC2 setup in 2011, that's for around 2k unique daily users. The load balancer kept on false triggering new instances, so we went to GAE in 2012. Since then our uptime has been horrifically good, heavily thanks for GAE, trashing that of our competition, who mostly use AWS. Last month we…

Without GAE/GCP my business wouldn't be where it is today and in such a short amount of time. I can't reveal numbers, but our bill and usage is significantly higher than yours. But, it is still just a rounding error compared with our revenue. Thanks to GAE, we focus our work on real features for our partners, which translates directly into profit.

A post on this topic that I made a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840

Thanks again Google! =)

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#74

Post by dlor »

jfoster wrote: post #72
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.

Does Google still patch the stack (kernel, web server, interpreter, database, modules, etc.) whenever security issues are discovered? I always thought that was one of the best bits of the App Engine model.

Currently we patch all the software on the VM, but not the application container itself. We make new base images available, but the user has to re-deploy to pick up these changes.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#75

Post by jfoster »

dlor wrote: post #74
jfoster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google still patch the stack (kernel, web server, interpreter, database, modules, etc.) whenever security issues are discovered? I always thought that was one of the best bits of the App Engine model.

Currently we patch all the software on the VM, but not the application container itself. We make new base images available, but the user has to re-deploy to pick up these changes.

Is there any notification (email, readable VM version on a server, etc.) when one of those redeployments should occur?

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#76

Post by hypertexthero »

justinblat wrote: post #50
mattbillenstein wrote: post #31

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.

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.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#77

Post by foxylad »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #31

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…

We've had a very different experience than you. We've used Appengine since 2009, and are about to launch our third service built on it.

It's important to understand that that Appengine is not AWS. It is a massively distributed system providing scalability and fault-tolerance that you would need something like ten AWS servers spread over several availability zones to replicate.

Slow - true, request responses can be several times slower than a single AWS server. That latency is due to the distributed nature of the datastore and memcache - but that buys completely seamless scaling. So if you think you need speed to handle lots of requests, you don't. Appengine will spin up as many instances as you need to manage your traffic.

Expensive - I'm a nasty mean bugger so if there was a cheaper option, I'd take it. A single server on AWS might be slightly cheaper, but ten AWS servers spread over several availability zones (and the sysadmin to manage them) are definitely not.

OSS - ummm, you haven't read the article, have you? You have access to the source code of pretty much everything.

Stable - in the early days of the master-slave datastore, we did have occasional outages. But in the last four years we've had a single outage that affected our customers. I thank my lucky stars every time AWS has a hiccup. Furthermore when there is an outage, I know there are better sysadmins than I could ever afford dealing with it.

At the end of the day, it's the usual horses for courses. If you like doing your own sysadmin, Appengine will fill you with horror. But if you are a developer, Appengine abstracts the system admin away so you can concentrate on doing what you do best.

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#78

Post by bduerst »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #31

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…

Why didn't you use managed VMs?

Re: Node.js on Google App Engine Goes Beta

#79

Post by boulos »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #70
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.

Hi Justin, I'm currently trying to get my feet wet on GAE. Judging from your statement, are you suggesting that people should look into Managed VMs and maybe skip the regular GAE (or known as the original GAE)? Perhaps the original GAE will be deprecated in the future?

No, that's not the case. Managed VMs is a more flexible environment than our "GAE Standard" environment, but (at least currently) comes with some of the tradeoffs of a full VM (startup time, minimum size, etc.). If you've got say a vanilla python app that doesn't need custom native modules, GAE Standard is great! If you want to run something we don't currently support, then Managed VMs gives you the flexibility a Compute Engine VM can offer you (run whatever you like).

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not App Engine but I'm familiar enough with their thinking.

Post reply on HN