On the contrary, GC is NOT entire blocked in China. Some of the Google services (including GC console / dashboard) are indeed blocked but GC's IP address pool and the applications running on GC does seem to be accessible in China.

My company is running mostly on Google Cloud and I had just returned from a trip in China where I've verified it.

In my experience (3 months in Shanghai at the end of last year) AWS does occasionally get blocked or severely slowed down in China. I'd say it was inaccessible about 5% of the time (for significant periods of time).

You can of course run in the AWS Beijing region which requires you to have a Chinese business presence with a ICP license.

It'll be interesting to see what happens now that Google is expanding its presence in China [1]. I ran into some Googlers on the Maps team while in Shanghai - not likely a coincidence.

[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34698642

The old App Engine / API / Admin console era is over. All tasks have been migrated to https://console.cloud.google.com/ including some of the last App Engine specific administration things.

Slightly off-topic, but not too off-topic question: Does GCE have a text format for its configuration?

My pet peeve with cloud services and their web-based admin GUIs is that you have to use the GUI or the APIs to do anything. You can't capture the current configuration and then replay it if anything is misconfigured. You can't save or restore the config. You can't diff the config across versions. Most SaaSes don't even have audit logs, or if they do, they're too minimalistic to provide the ability to get a lot of detail or roll back anything.

My wish list item is a kind of "Puppet for GCE". I write my manifest, push them to the cloud, and stuff happens. If something isn't mentioned in my manifest, it gets deleted. Truthfully, I don't want to use a web GUI at all.

At the very least there should be a way to do an inventory of an account. Recently I needed to take over an older AWS account, and I wanted to find out what was in it — instances, load balancers, buckets, and so on. It's virtually impossible to do this with the management console since the ontology of possibly configurable objects is so huge and complicated, and pretty much everything has a computer-generated hash instead of a human name, so I was surprised when I couldn't find anything.

In (most?) places throughout the web-based console you can click a little link to show you the REST API equivalent of your resource (whether it's an instance, a disk, or a command you're about to do). You might be able to make the job of "exporting your infrastructure" somewhat straightforward from those, though I think I'd personally just write against the handful of APIs in Go. All of our newer offerings (meaning GCS, GCE, etc.) have really sane object models that just map directly to a fairly obvious, autogenerated struct in the Go client library. Here's the struct for an Instance:

  https://godoc.org/google.golang.org/api/compute/v1#Instance

Thanks, being able to see the API call for a resource is a nice convenience.

But part of my point was that while you can code together something with APIs, you still need to write the diffing and converging logic to accomplish what I suggested. For example, if someone has gone through the console and added something, so that you now have a conflict, you want to be able to resolve the conflict. First by either accepting or rejecting the conflicting change, and then, if you rejected it, remove it as part of the next push.

Check out Deployment Manager...I think it has what you're looking for.

(I work at Google but not on Deployment Manager)

https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/overview

Perhaps you want to look at something like Hashicorp's Terraform (https://www.terraform.io/) which will do most, if not all, of what you're looking for.

That's exactly what I was looking for, thanks! Only feature missing is that it apparently can't dump an existing setup to file; looks like you have to write them from scratch.