App Engine standard vs. flexible min instances - google-app-engine

Running an app in the standard environment with instance_class: F2 (512 MB/1.2 GHz), min_instances: 1, max_instances: 3 it almost always runs with 2 or 3 active/billed instances, rarely dropping to 1.
Attempting to match the config above in the flexible environment, if I run the app with cpu: 1, memory_gb: 0.5, max_num_instances: 3 it runs most of the time with only a single instance active, halving the cost.
Without having to resort to max_instances: 1 is there a way to configure the standard environment to bring it more inline with the flexible? I've tried using target_cpu_utilization and max_concurrent_requests. E.g. target_cpu_utilization: 0.8, max_concurrent_requests: 80 but this makes no difference.

Related

Uptime checks keeping some AppEngine instances alive and others not?

We've noticed that using GCP's Monitoring Uptime checks on one AppEngine service appears to keep it 'alive' unnecessarily - removing the monitoring configuration reduced the running instances to 0. However, we have two other AppEngine services that would happily reduce to 0 instances, even with the monitoring in place.
We've been unable to find any difference in configuration. The one other visible difference we spotted was in the 'Traffic' graphs, the instances that still shut down included 'Sent (cached)' and 'Received (cached)' as series on the graph (along side Sent and Received):
Whereas the 'problem' service only has Sent and Received:
There is no cloud load balancing in place - we're just using AppEngine to map the endpoints.
Config for both look like this, with different handlers configured:
runtime: python310
env: standard
instance_class: F1
handlers:
- *snip*
automatic_scaling:
min_idle_instances: automatic
max_idle_instances: automatic
min_pending_latency: automatic
max_pending_latency: automatic
service_account: XXXX#appspot.gserviceaccount.com
Can anyone clarify what might be different between these? Thank you.

App Engine Standard Nodejs8 ignore memory_gb in resources

I'm trying to deploy a Nodejs8, memory intense app on Google App Engine Standard.
This is my app.yaml:
runtime: nodejs8
resources:
cpu: 1
memory_gb: 6
disk_size_gb: 10
This is my deploy command:
gcloud app deploy --project=my-project --version=0-0-12
This is the error I get when I try to access the relevant endpoint of the app:
Exceeded soft memory limit of 128 MB with 182 MB after servicing 0 requests total. Consider setting a larger instance class in app.yaml.
How come the memory_gb param is ignored? What do I need to do in order to enlarge the memory of the instances?
You're attempting to use flexible environment Resource settings into a standard environment app.yaml file, which won't work. Note that in most cases the invalid settings will be silently ignored, so you need to be careful.
For the standard environment you can't explicitly pick individual resources, you can only use the instance_class option in Runtime and app elements:
instance_class
Optional. The instance class for this service.
The following values are available depending on your service's
scaling:
Automatic scaling
F1, F2, F4, F4_1G
Default: F1 is assigned if you do not specify an instance class along with the automatic_scaling element.
Basic and manual scaling
B1, B2, B4, B4_1G, B8
Default: B2 is assigned if you do not specify an instance class along with the basic_scaling element or the
manual_scaling element.
Note: If instance_class is set to F2 or higher, you can optimize your instances by setting max_concurrent_requests to a
value higher than 10, which is the default. To find the optimal value,
gradually increase it and monitor the performance of your application.
The max amount of memory available in the currently supported standard environment instance classes is 1G, if you actually need 6G you'll have to migrate to the flexible environment.
Side note: potentially useful: How to tell if a Google App Engine documentation page applies to the standard or the flexible environment

Dynamic Instances: why so many? can these be limited?

I'm maintaining a production app on GAE. The number of 'dynamic' instances we have seems very high. According to our app.yaml, these should be 'F4' instances. Some of these instances serve lots of requests - and others very few (see pic below). I have no idea why.
my questions:
why are some instance very busy and others not?
can I limit the number of dynamic instances?
EDIT: I'm adding some more details here:
the pic above shows a few dynamic instances. there are a lot more - as many as 24 in total.
In the app.yaml we configured 1 min/max idle instances. this (presumably) shows up as the single 'resident' instance I have.
below is a portion of my app.yaml that is relevant.
I understand that the idle machine kicks in when other machines can't handle the load. perhaps this is triggered by requests that take too long to complete (and perhaps this is why I have so many dynamic machines?)
runtime: python27
api_version: 1
threadsafe: yes
instance_class: F4
automatic_scaling:
min_idle_instances: 1
max_idle_instances: 1
....
libraries:
- name: webapp2
version: "2.5.1"
- name: ssl
version: latest
inbound_services:
- warmup

Target micro instance in Flexible AppEngine

Is it possible to target a custom runtime to use a micro instance?
I tried with:
resources:
cpu: 0.5
memory_gb: 0.6
disk_size_gb: 10
But a small instance is started.
Add following to your app.yaml:
beta_settings:
machine_type: f1-micro
In App Engine, the instance type cannot be specified for the flex environment (unlike the standard environment in Python, Java and Go).
In the flex environment, the instance types are derived from the resource settings specified in your app.yaml file.
App Engine Resource Settings
It appears, that for some reason the pricing calculator lets you enter small values so the instance appears similar to a F1-micro (I was looking for around $5/month to run it) but then alas when it comes to specifying it in app.yaml it defaults to something that costs a whole lot more than an f1-micro, and you can't set the values to anything lower than what OP shows.
example very small flex instance in pricing calculator

Is it possible to specify a machine type (e.g small/micro) when deploying to Managed VM?

I'm migrating some simple web apps (Node based static pages with some questionnaires and a very small amount of back end processing) to App Engine. I have them working well. Impressed with how easy it was!
However, I have a couple of questions that baffle me.
1) Why does GCE always deploy 2 machines? Is there a way of specifying to only run 1? I really don't need loads of redundancy, and our traffic is expected to be light.
2) I have tried to specify the machine type in app.yaml to be 'micro'. Call me cheap, but we really don't need much capacity. I have tried various perameters e.g.
resources:
cpu: .5
memory_gb: .2
disk_size_gb: 10
but it always seems to deploy 'small' machines. Is there a log somewhere that would tell me that the commmand was valid, but it chose to ingore it?
Thanks in advance.
Ah ha! Sorry, with a bit more googling around I found an answer to Q2
Setting f1-micro resource limits in app.yaml for google cloud compute node.js app without vm_settings
As Jeff and Greg both replied, "Google adds a little overhead on the
VM before picking a machine type. This is around 400mb of ram. So they
told me if you want an f1-micro try requesting .2 or lower as Greg
mentioned."
I had to drop to .18 to get it to deploy as f1-micro, but the general
idea that google is adding overhead is solid.
Dropping down the memory_gb to 0.18 did the trick.
Simply adding
resources:
cpu: .5
memory_gb: .18
disk_size_gb: 10
and deploying with the command
gcloud preview app deploy --stop-previous-version --force --promote
to make damn sure it was made #1 seemed to work - no loss in performance so far.
You can also specify machine type, not just required resources. By adding into app.yaml:
beta_settings:
machine_type: f1-micro
Also, if you want to always use 1 instance add this:
manual_scaling:
instances: 1

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