The documentation from Google is not really clear about it.
Here ( https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/vpn/overview ) it says
Google Cloud VPN securely connects your existing network to your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) network through an IPsec VPN connection
Considering that Both Google App Engine (GAE) and Google Compute Engine (GCE) are part of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it would mean that Google Cloud VPN works for both GAE and GCE.
Also, the section for Cloud VNP is at the same level than GAE and GCE in the project console :
But the documentation is located in /compute/docs which should not obviously be compatible with /appengine/docs
And here is a graph describing the tunnel, which talks only about GCE, which could exclude GAE :
So, is GAE compatible with Cloud VPN or is it restricted to GCE only ?
Google Cloud VPN securely connects your existing network to your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) network through an IPsec VPN connection. Therefore, only resources that are connected to GCP networks can communicate through Cloud VPN tunnels.
App Engine Flexible Environment is based on Google Compute Engine and consequently can connect to your remote network via Cloud VPNs. As described in this article, you can specify network settings in your app.yaml configuration file of your GAE Flexible application.
EDIT Rodrigo Torres has pointed out that this is NOW possible.
(Leaving up the old post below. It is now WRONG!!!)
OLD POST:
Google App Engine standard CAN'T use VPN directly, however the new Flexible Google App Engine (now officially released, no longer in beta) CAN use it directly. Just set up google cloud VPN and your network from the console and make sure to include the network in your app.yaml file.
Flexible App Engine is be the easiest way for new applications to utilize VPN connections since there won't be any migration headaches.
For a standard app engine application that can't be ported over to flexible for whatever reason, you CAN still use a VPN connection - however, it requires a service to be running on flexible app engine (or compute engine), and your app will need to interface with it somehow. This may be the simplest method, as migrating from standard to flexible is not the simplest of tasks. I know - I've done it.
I am very newly in google app engine.. There are three Questoins on google app engine and in google app engine i want to choose JAVA language.
Does google app engine provide private cloude ?
I want to deploy my application with my own server( E.x.glassfish or JBoss) on google app engine ?
I want to use my own database instead of cloud SQL in google app engine?
Is it possible or not?
With Google Cloud Appengine - no, it's impossible.
With Google Cloud Instances or Google Cloud Containers - all of this is possible.
Appengine is just one piece of Google Cloud, designed for very specific job, with infrastructure managed by Google. You can only write some code (with lot of restrictions too) that runs inside it. You can read some details about code restritions there: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/#Java_The_sandbox
What you're looking for is Google Cloud Instances, that are more standard virtual machines, where you can run anything you want. See https://cloud.google.com/compute/
There is still tools for Load Balancing, Health Check, Centralized Logging for Cloud Instances, and other stuff similar to features provided by Appengine.
TLDR;
Are there any updates about this question?
Google App Engine communicate with Compute Engine over internal network
--
It is possibile to enable HTTP traffic between App Engine and Compute Engine instances that are in the same Cloud Project?
Obviously denying all HTTP traffic from other sources.
Between AWS EC2/RDS/Beanstalk this is possibile with "security groups".
I think the best you can currently do is managed VMs (https://developers.google.com/cloud/managed-vms, early access right now). It's essentially managed VMs running custom code in the app engine project. I did not check if the managed VMs will be able to run together with other gce VMs in the same network - if they did one could just connect to the internal addresses of the other instances. There does not appear to be a configuration option to define a network so I'm leaning to guess that they won't be able to see each other on the network like that.
But as an answer to the general question, I don't think there is any way of referencing app engine runtimes as sources in gce network ACLs currently.
As of now In 2016 as google cloud has launched google cloud flexible environment appengine/docs/flexible/. So yes it is possible now because now both app engine and compute engine are present in same network and therefore using app engine you can access compute engine by using their internal Ip, also remember to delete all external firewall rules for your compute engines if you only want to allow access from app engine.
there isn't way to reference App Engine resource within GCE. If you are trying to access GCE only from App Engine app, then you could define ACL in GCE to let traffic only from your AppEngine external IP.
I am pretty new to this whole idea of cloud and started of with Google app engine. 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.
But I don't see such an option with Google-cloud/app-engine. What if I have a tom-cat based application server which I would like to deploy on a cloud? Will Google app engine be of any help or should I try other cloud service providers such as Amazon EC2, hp cloud etc?
/DJ
The cloud type that you are referring to is called Infrastructure as a Service cloud.
OTOH, Google App Engine is Platform as a Service cloud.
The difference is that IaaS are a bunch of virtual machines that you need to setup yourself (OS + app stack), while PaaS typically comes with it's own API, where you write your app against the API and the rest (sw stack + scalability) is taken care of.
AppEngine comes with it's own servlet container (Tomcat is also a servlet container), so from this standpoint you could use your code on AppEngine. But the problem lies elsewhere: AppEngine imposes a set of limitation on the apps:
app must use GAE provided databases.
app can not write to filesystem
app can not have listening sockets
requests must finish in 60 seconds (e.g. no Comet or WebSockets -> no push)
You might want to review the FAQ.
To add to Peter's excellent answer, note that Google also has an IaaS service called Google Compute Engine.
Regarding other cloud query-
Before you start with cloud you might once try other options. Currently deploying application in almost all services are very easy.
few of them are-
Jelastic , Heroku , rackspace , nimbus , openshift etc.
Difference between cloud and server is very well explained already.
Since you mentioned about tomcat based application , I have worked with Jelastic for the same and found very easy to implement.
http://jelastic.com/docs/tomcat
http://jelastic.com/tomcat-hosting
Try all possible option , it will help you more .
Google created the V8 JavaScript engine: V8 compiles JavaScript source code directly into machine code when it is first executed.
Node.js is built on V8 - why is Google not offering any Node.js servers like Microsoft Azure?
Google App Engine would be a natural place to put Node.js.
Do you know why Google is not doing just that?
Node.js is maintained by Joyent, who is in a way a competitor of Google.
Node.js has no link what so ever with Google but is in fact built on top of an open source project started by Google.
Google might jumped into this business just like Azure did, but there are already so many PaaS doing it, it might not be worth it. I have never used GAE, but my understanding is that it is quite different that other PaaS and you have to use GAE libraries to make your code run.
Which, this is my personal feeling, is not really what the Node.js community is looking for.
Node.js is used to quickly make a fast lightweight app, a big share for APIs for Phone apps for example.
Nevertheless if you are looking for a PaaS for Node.js, the are quite a few out there:
Joyent (nodejitsu)
dotCloud which has WebSockets support.
Windows Azure
Nodester (bought by App Fog recently)
Any Cloud Foundry host should support Node.js too.
and many more...
Those are just some names off the top of my head. There quite a few but those are the major ones.
Oh there is Heroku too, but they don't have support for WebSocket which is a bummer for any Socket.IO based app.
As of June 2014, Google had a limited preview for custom languages on Google App Engine (which is different from Google Compute Engine).
Watch Building Node.js applications with App Engine and Custom Runtimes and check out https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/:
App Engine now offers a second hosting option: Managed VMs. The Managed VM hosting environment lets you run App Engine applications on configurable Compute Engine Virtual Machines (VMs).
You can also use Managed VMs to deploy user-configurable custom runtimes, such as for Node.js and other runtimes.
The procedure to get into the beta is:
Sign up and create a Managed VM project
Managed VMs are in Limited Preview, you must sign up for access to this feature, create a billing-enabled project, and tell us about your project so we can whitelist it to run in a Managed VM. Follow these steps:
Sign up for access to Managed VMs.
Join the app-engine-managed-vms Google Group to participate in discussions about Managed VMs.
Projects (or apps - they are the same thing) must be in a U.S. data center. If you're planning to use an existing project, skip to the next step. Otherwise, create a new app in a U.S. data center. Navigate to https://preview.appengine.google.com and create a new app.
Enable billing for the project. Visit the page https://cloud.google.com/console/project/apps~, where is the ID of your project. Click on Settings in the left menu and then enable billing. If your app is billed under a Premier account, email us at app-engine-managed-vm-tt-id#google.com to have your new Cloud project billed under the same account.
Send an email to app-engine-managed-vm-tt-id#google.com with the application ID in the subject line.
When we receive your email, we’ll configure some resources behind the scenes and notify you via email when your project is ready to go. The email includes final instructions for setup. If you encounter an error while following these instructions, contact us at app-engine-managed-vm-tt-id#google.com.
You can easily install node on Google Compute Engine (which basically is a virtual computer). Here is a link:
https://developers.google.com/datastore/docs/getstarted/start_nodejs/
Regards
Lars
after years of experiences in google appengine, i switch to other cloud services now.
i think google appengine is actually an old fashion service in cloud computing industry. which is slow to new technology, difficult to deploy, time wasting to learn the apis and lacking of a lot of features you need in languages you use.
regardless of google's large community, i would not suggest anyone to use google appengine.
[newer paas]
i strongly recommend you to use openshift, appfog, heroku .etc's new paas cloud computing technologies, which are far more extensible, less change needing, more migrable from one platform to another, more freely coding in the beauty of the natural lanuage and its standard libraries without ugly platform specific apis.
[iaas]
if you want more control over the running os environment, you may give linode, digital ocean, amazon, google cloud engine, microsoft azure etc. iaas providers a try.
Because App Engine is a platform-as-a-service, and in order to add a new language/stack to GAE, Google need to create mid-level libraries that interface with the plethora of App Engine's services.
Moreover, all App Engine apps is sandboxed and has several functionalities restricted from inside their sandbox environment. This means that beside the need to create service libraries, Google also need to create a secured sandbox environment for any language/stack that they try to introduce into GAE.
I personally think the second reason is why Google does not introduce support for new language/stack as aggressive as Azure did. App Engine is, in a way, more 'managed' than Azure, and has a larger initial development cost for new language/stack.
It has been released as of March 2016.
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Node.js-on-Google-App-Engine-goes-beta.html
Node.js has recently enabled support for Google Cloud users. The main document pages are:
Node.js on Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Datastore — Google Developers
It seems to require at the moment a Compute Engine instance.
Background: App Engine Standard vs App Engine Flexible
There seems to be some confusion on this topic because there are two versions of App Engine: Standard and Flexible. NodeJS is supported on App Engine Flexible but NOT on App Engine Standard. (See here for a more complete explanation of the differences).
App Engine Standard scales in seconds (as opposed to minutes for the Flexible environment), and has a free tier, so you can develop and demo without spending a dime. These benefits come at the cost of flexibility. App Engine Standard only supports certain languages and libraries, doesn't allow writing to disk nor SSH. In other words, the environment is standardized.
Answer: NodeJS Support on App Engine Standard
If you are interested in NodeJS support on App Engine Standard, please star this issue: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/67711509.
Google addresses features that get attention from the community (see here). The best way to give your attention to this feature, is to star it on the Google Issue tracker linked to above.
Google announced on March, 21st 2016 that Node.js on Google App Engine was going beta: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Node.js-on-Google-App-Engine-goes-beta.html?m=1
This was expected as Google also joined the Node.js Foundation and Google develops the V8 JavaScript engine which powers Chrome and Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/welcome-google/
Google announced a partnership with NodeSource at the same time.
Google has just announced support for Node.js on App Engine.
See: https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/
Here's an example of how to deploy Node.js app on App Engine.
Google is a software-conservative company. Programming a backend in JavaScript would be absolutely unimaginable for Google's managers. Creating infrastructure Google itself won't be using is not a good investment. Reference: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus
(Jun 2021) This question is almost a decade old, and many things have changed since the OP. TL;DR: JavaScript and/or Node.js are supported in 6 different serverless compute platforms from Google: 4 on GCP and one each from Google Workspace and Firebase plus release dates:
Google App Engine - Standard (Jun 2018) - announcement, docs (Node.js 10, 12, 14; 8 is deprecated)
Google App Engine - Flexible (Mar 2016) - announcement (general release), docs (Most Node.js versions)
Google Cloud Functions (Mar 2017) - announcement (general release), docs (Node.js 10, 12, 14; 8 is deprecated)
Cloud Functions for Firebase (Mar 2017) - announcement, docs (same versions as Google Cloud Functions)
Google Cloud Run (Apr 2019) - announcement (general release), docs (Any Node.js version you can put in a container)
Google Apps Script (Aug 2009) - announcement, docs (JS-only, not Node; Rhino ES3/ES5 + extensions originally; now v8 & ES6+ [Mar 2020])
Also see Google Cloud's overall support of/for Node.js.