Which PaaS (platform as a service) to consider for auto-scaling MEAN stack. Have previously used Google App Engine for REST Api web development. I am looking for something similar (to GAE) which autoscales MEAN.
First choice suggestion is Heroku.
Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build and run applications entirely in the cloud.
Second choice suggestion is AppFog.
If you want to make your own decision on pros-n-cons Heroku vs AppFog
Related
So I have a web application where the Frontend is written in React and the backend is written in NodeJs/NestJs, and are in the stages of deploying the application. I have a Linode server running Ubuntu, and my initial thoughts was to install Docker & Kubernetes (I will need a couple more servers) and then spin up containers for the front and backend, and a separate server hosting the database. Since the requirements are high uptime, scaleability and modularity.
So is this a good way to go about setting up the application? Are there any pros and cons with this setup except pricing because of the amount of servers needed? Or are there any other options available that could be more benefitial?
Thanks in advance.
It depends if you want to make DevOps job or not, and also about the budget you have.
If you really want to stay in control of your clusters, scalability of them and money is not a worry, then kubernetes is a good alternative.
Disclaimer: I don't know Linode and have no idea if there is some GCP compatible services.
For front-end, you said it was react: The hosting service of firebase, here's a tutorial.
And the good news is that you can alternatively use any cloud platform with a storage service like Google Storage, AWS S3 or Azure.
For back-end, I would suggest App Engine or functions, I'm having a great experience using App Engine and is a lot easier to configure than any pods, deployments, ingress and all steps to deploy a kubernetes cluster. I'm not really sure if you can use NestJs with Cloud Functions and all FaaS options.
Also, this suggestion will make you spend a lot less than a whole k8s infrastructure.
But, of course, it depends on your case.
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.
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.
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 .
I'm finding alternatives for Google App Engine for startup. The preconfigured service hosting include security, networking, scaling, database, backup, application, maturity and etc.. Because we have no experts on each parts. It's too hard operating whole service stack properly for only one application programmer.
What other services can I consider for this?
The term you want to search for is PaaS or Platform-as-a-Service. I do not claim to be an expert in this nacent field, however my basic understanding of the key players other than Google App Engine are:
Amazon AWS - My understanding is that Amazon's Web Services gives you bare-bones OS installs that you can completely own. While this allows for more configuration than App Engine, this also means you are on the hook for patching security holes and what not. (Right?)
Heroku - App Engine type functionality, except for Ruby
AppHarbor - App Engine type functionality, except for .NET
Microsoft Azure - Amazon AWS type functionality, except for Windows/The Microsoft stack.
The CloudCamp awards 2011 serves as a nice list of PaaS services