Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoulMan | Hacker News Reader

Standard, in my opinion, is still the best bet of you want most of the things out of the box from GCP. Flex does allow a lot of customization but you miss out on Memcache, Task Queues, Auto tracing in Stackdriver etc which are sometimes really backbone of your highly scalable architecture given that you don't want to manage your own infrastructure.

View on HN

The free tier is frighten awesome. I love using GAE standard backends for my hobby projects

Better than Heroku? I'm still thinking about GAE for my upcoming app API :-) Cheers

Gigalixir has been wooing me. I've been writing phoenix apps lately and Gigalixir include 10k rows of postgres for free, plus no sleeps and no daily restarts. Definitely worth looking at.

Founder of Gigalixir here in case you have any questions. Also, happy to give out free credits for the standard tier. Gigalixir also works with many languages other than Elixir.

What does it include?

I was looking into it a bit today, but was discouraged after hearing some comments about having to specialize on the application source level to accommodate the GAE environment, and that you have to use their proprietary non-relational database.

Are those things true, or as significant as they sound? (Not being able to directly port my source to another service sounds quite risky...)

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

That’s ancient history, particularly with these recent launches, as Google Cloud has become a real platform.

This is vanilla node. You need not use Datastore, and can happily talk to a managed MySQL or Postgres instance via Cloud SQL (albeit sadly still via public IP and/or a proxy for now). The same is true of the recent Java 8 support, and will be true of all the new runtimes going forward (as mentioned downthread, the Google I/O talk is the best reference here).

Google Cloud Functions is similar, fwiw. You can even package up arbitrary binaries and exec them (ffmpeg is a favorite, as is imagemagick’s convert).

Not to mention that standard is enough to run a pretty significant free-tier site.

I'd way rather program in JS than Python [edited: thanks yathern], especially now that async/await is a thing in Javascript. Very cool work by the Appengine team.

> rather program in Node than JS

Node is JS, of course (with a different standard library). Did you perhaps mean to compare Node to python or something?

Thanks for the correction! I mean, "Rather program in JS than Python," but my hands typed faster than my brain was keeping up. Oopsie.

Yeah but the "standard" env is always behind(at least on the Go version) and on top of that you are even more locked in. The only real advantage of the standard environment is that you pay only for what you use. On the "fkexible" environment you must keep at least one instance live all the time. IMHO you should avoid GAE.

Perhaps you should avoid GAE for hobby projects, but if you can afford it, it can save you some money in not needing any ops. For hobby sites you probably barely need ops.

well, i don't use GAE too. All in with cloud functions. In fact, planning to migrate my payments backend to cloud functions this week.

Standard GAE is great for hobby projects due to the free tier. It's nice to still have a running server that I haven't touched in years.

By contrast, I deployed an app on Digital Ocean and, though they have a solid product, I eventually shut the instance down to avoid paying the monthly fee on an app I rarely used.

You might want to take a look at our talk from Google I/O about the new runtime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogexnfng_hE&t=515s

The new runtime is 100% idiomatic without any special apis. We do offer certain native libraries pre compiled system libraries (to support headless chrome among other things) and certain ENV Variables for gcp API tokens.

You should be able to lift and shift a GAE Standard Node.js app to any other provider with minimal overhead.

I can't make direct promises regarding the runtime update cadence, but I can promise that I work closely with the people responsible for this and they care a lot about getting updates out in a timely fashion. The new runtime stack makes this easier to do than previous GAE Standard runtimes.

(Disclaimer: I work for GCP)

What's the reasoning behind the headless chrome inclusion? It seems a very niche thing to build in.

> IMHO you should avoid GAE.

And you should stop telling others what works best for them without knowing anything about what their projects and needs are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com