Three Years on Google App Engine

Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by ryanianian on Sunday December 31, 2017 @03:25PM (#16042696)

Good, balanced article. I'd love to see something similar for the competitors like AWS Elastic Beanstalk or the upcoming "App Engine Flexible Environment" that the author mentions (of course it'd be hard to get a "3 years in" perspective for such a new product).

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Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by spyspy on Sunday December 31, 2017 @03:49PM (#16042872)

App Engine Flex is newer but I wouldn't describe it as "upcoming". My company's been using it in production for a while now.

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Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by elithrar on Sunday December 31, 2017 @03:57PM (#16042935)

Agree. In fact, I strongly prefer the Flex environment as it doesn't require you to use any proprietary libs or services: your applications get deployed as containers, can auto-scale, and are health checked.

This has always been one of the benefits of Heroku to me: I don't have to architect my application for a single vendor's environment. If I use a hosted Postgres backend, then even more so.

What Google should consider doing is making App Engine "classic" services like Memcached, etc. available to any service running across GCP. Flex is fairly different from classic, but I think there's some confusion generated from the "App Engine" name and the baggage (good & bad) it has gathered over the years.

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Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by thesandlord on Sunday December 31, 2017 @04:10PM (#16043009)

> What Google should consider doing is making App Engine "classic" services like Memcached, etc. available to any service running across GCP.

Already being done. First was Datastore, now Cloud Tasks is in Alpha. Expect to see others (Cron, Cache, etc) come as well.

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Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by karl42 on Sunday December 31, 2017 @06:27PM (#16043618)

But there is still no way to use ndb from outside App Engine standard, right?

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Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by Jahava on Monday January 01, 2018 @09:05AM (#16046088)

> But there is still no way to use ndb from outside App Engine standard, right?

Shameless plug, but for Go, there is an unofficial third-party (Chromium team) datastore package that feature near-seamless AppEngine standard/flex datastore support: https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/luci/gae/+/master

It currently couples to any hosted memcached service, but should be forward-compatible with AppEngine if/when they release a Flex-accessible cloud version of their hosted memcache.

"luci/gae" also features a fully-compliant in-memory datastore mock for 1000x+ faster datastore testing and uses a memcache implementation based on "qedus/nds" which fixes several consistency issues present in "ndb".

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Re:Three Years on Google App Engine by Jahava on Monday January 01, 2018 @09:00AM (#16046066)

> What Google should consider doing is making App Engine "classic" services like Memcached, etc. available to any service running across GCP.

Many AppEngine standard services are accessible using the "cloud" versions of APIs/endpoints. You may have to do some more heavy lifting, although on Flex you get GCE self-authentication for free, and most "cloud" API packages know how to recognize and utilize this.

Memcache is apparently on the list to receive a cloud API, although it's been in the "pre-alpha" state for over a year now. See: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/java/upgrad...

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