Locally run Google App Engine Flex with Memcache? - google-app-engine

I am trying to run google app engine with memcache locally with go run *.go and I am getting the following response:
service bridge HTTP failed: Post http://appengine.googleapis.internal:10001/rpc_http: dial tcp: lookup appengine.googleapis.internal: no such host**
What is the proper way to run locally?

The library that you are trying to use is a App Engine standard environment library that is not available in the flexible environment. The flexible environment is built on top of Compute Engine and a very different system. You could try using MemoryStore for Redis. You also might be able to break your application into microservices. An App Engine project can have services on different runtime environments (mix of flex/std, mix of languages), but you'll have to be careful about how you communicate and work across the services. Its not necessarily a trivial thing to rearchitect your app though.

Related

How to test Google App Engine app locally with Hot Reloading and other supported libraries?

In the past, we can test GAE apps with dev_appserver.py [/path/to/my-project]. This was very useful because it provided helpful error messages in the terminal.
With the advent of gcloud SDK, it is suggested that we set up a virtualenv and test apps locally by running python main.py. Is this the recommended way for large apps too? Or is this just a quick-start way to demonstrate how to run App Engine locally?
What is the suggested local environment for building production-ready GAE apps?
The SDK was previously providing a local dev_appserver since the App Engine Standard 1st generation environment was integrating built-in APIs (Datastore, Memcache, etc...) that needed to be emulated locally to properly run/test your application.
The 2nd generation now deprecated these built-in APIs and rely on Cloud Client Libraries (more info on the runtime differences here). This means that you don't need anymore an emulated environment for your local testing. Your application, either large or small, should be able to run indifferently locally and when deployed.

Cloud Datastore Client Library vs App Engine SDK on App Engine Go Standard

When writing a Go App Engine Standard app, it used to be the case that you had to use the App Engine SDK to access the data store. However, these days (since Go 1.11?), it seems to work if you just use the Cloud Datastore Client Library.
Is there a downside of using the Cloud Datastore Client Library on App Engine Standard for accessing the datastore? (apart from a bit of extra configuration to make the dev appserver use the emulator). The advantage is that it enables code reuse for other environments.
App Engine Standard for Go1.11 runs on the new, second generation (beta) runtime which doesn't have the limitations of the 1st generation and is capable of running any framework, library, or binary. On the other hand, App Engine no longer modifies the Go toolchain to include the appengine package and it is strongly recommended to use the Google Cloud client library or third party libraries instead of the App Engine-specific APIs.
For more details about this, I recommend to have a look at the doc here about the differences between both generations and how to handle them.

Different App Engine Applications in Google Cloud

I'm looking at moving my application to google cloud and I'm having a hard time understanding how best to organize my project. It seems like you can only have one App Engine application per project with services available to support a microservices architecture and instances representing the App Engine instances created via auto scaling.
What is the correct way to build an App Engine for my API server and an App Engine for my Web Server? Do I need to have a project for each? I'm essentially trying to accomplish the following:
It is straightforward to have a single GAE project implement both your website and an API. You can even do this within a single service. You could put each in a separate service, and the advantage of that is that you can update one without updating the other. For small projects, a disadvantage is that two services are more expensive than one (though GAE is quite inexpensive overall).
For prod vs dev, you'll need to explain your requirements a little more, but here are some thoughts.
Each GAE service has multiple versions. You can deploy your production version to www.mycompany.com and deploy a dev version to dev-dot-myapp.appspot.com (that's the way GAE does URLs for versions of your app). Both of these versions will access the same datastore so you need to be careful with the dev version so that it doesn't mess up your prod implementation.
If you have a dev situation that is bleeding edge and shouldn't be able to access the datastore of your production app, then you would create a different GAE project for that.
Here is a way to visualize it:
Google Cloud Project A
GAE Project A
production www service
production API service (this could be combined with production www service)
dev www service
dev API service
Google Cloud Project B
GAE Project B
bleeding edge www service
bleeding edge API service
Best Practices:
Your Dev and Prod should be in separate projects for both security and billing purposes.
App Engine:
You can only have one App Engine per project. This will create a problem for you to use App Engine for both API Server and Web Server. In this case, I would not use App Engine at all and instead look at Containers on Compute Engine or go for Kubernetes.
Even a single node Kubernetes Cluster will shock you with its flexibility and power. Containers on Compute Engine still have a lot flexibility and power too. If you like the concepts of App Engine Flexible, then you might really like containers. The exception here is that App Engine makes some concepts brain dead simple where you have more work in configuration for Containers or Kubernetes.

Reverse proxy between two (or more) Google App Engine projects

You have a Google Cloud project Project1 with App Engine enabled and serving your legacy application.
You want to rebuild your application using a different programming language and hence need a separate project (Project2) with its own separate App Engine.
You want to install some kind of reverse proxy appliance in front of your Project1 App Engine, so that you can gradually route more and more traffic to Project2's App Engine.
What's the best way to achieve this?
Google Cloud Load Balancer doesn't appear to work with App Engine (only Google Compute Engine), so I'm thinking establishing a reverse proxy server (e.g. NginX) container would be the best bet.
Depending on how you want to organize, you can duplicate your entire application within the same project by just deploying as a different service or as new versions of your existing service. For example, say you have two services frontend and backend for a simple web app. (Let's say they're both written in Python)
For deploying as a separate service, you can create a new version of your application in a different language, say Node.js. You can deploy the new services as frontend-node and backend-node.
If you don't want to do that, you can rewrite your application in a different language and then deploy as a new version of your existing services. In the "Versions" section, you can see your versions of the same service and they can be different language runtimes.
Either way, you can then use the "split-traffic" feature to customize and test implementations of your application.
Generally speaking, you should avoid using projects to isolate different variants and/or components of your application unless you really need too. App Engine services can each be a different runtime from each other so there's almost no point in provisioning a whole new project even though you're redeploying in a different language.

Google App Engine vs Tomcat

I was able to create the basic 'hello world' program.
When I tried to understand the difference between a cloud and a server I learned that Cloud is where you have an access to virtual instance created exclusively for you and you are free to choose and install software of your choice.Why Google App Engine(GAE) is used widely where as tomcat is not used. What are major differences between GAE and Tomcat?
Cloud is Google Cloud Platform at this case. App Engine is just one of their services.
App Engine is a platform to build your apps on top of it. A Platform As A Service or PaaS. It simplifies the process of building a scalable application, and you should use it when you understand what you really need and understand principles of scalable application.
Tomcat is a Java web container, and there're many alternatives. Google App Engine is using Jetty. You could actually use it with Tomcat by using Flexible VM, though it doesn't make much sense.
App Engine is not about web server, it's a set of services that helps you to build a scalable app. It includes Memcache, Datastore, Task Queue, Images API, deployments tools and versioning, CDN for static files, and most important automatic scale.
Actually you aren't limited to App Engine on Google Cloud Platform. There is more traditional service, like own server in the cloud, called Compute Engine. There you can run your Tomcat or anything else.

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