I'm building a static site which deploys to Google App Engine. Are there any advantages of storing the assets (js, css, imgs) in CloudStorage. All of the assets are going be under 32MB (if thats a limit).
Based on this slide (slides 24-28), it sounds like requests for static assets of a GAE app would use Google's special infrastructure designed for serving static assets. However its not clear about how its performance compares to Google CloudStorage.
Any clarifications on this would be much appreciated. Similar questions on Stackoverflow exists, but they are fairly dated (2010), and Google's Cloud products have changed since then.
Setting your cache headers will result in similar performance AFAIK.
Both GAE and GCS use Google Edge cache.
GCS is probably easier to manage your static resources, whereas it takes a redeploy to GAE to add/remove static resources.
Other important note : GCS as CDN does not work over HTTPS with custom domains. GAE does support HTTPS with custom domains.
Related
In the past when I've created a client-side web app using a framework like React, I can create a browser build and push it to a static hosting platform like AWS S3.
For Google Cloud Platform, it seems like the go-to approach is to deploy it to App Engine. If I'm understanding correctly, GAE is a combination of storage and compute resources.
Why can't I simply host the JavaScript app as prepared by webpack?
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) would be the way to go to host your static website on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Notice that in order to use GCS you'll need to have a domain as well as a GCP project. The documentation is very straightforward on how to achieve this. Here you can find some examples and other useful information.
You could also host your static website on Google App Engine (GAE). But in this case you'll need to cleverly build your app.yaml file in order to manage your URL handlers, as well as structuring your project in a particular way. Simply uploading the JS app as prepared by webpack won't work. You can find all the useful information here in order to use GAE to host your static website.
I have an application in Google app engine flexible which is written in Python. It uses Flask framework for backend. Currently, the flask framework serves the static files using the following code.
#app.route('/<path:path>') #Catch All urls, enabling copy-paste url
def home(path):
return send_from_directory(CLIENT_APP_FOLDER, path)
This eats up resources for serving my website written in Angular.
I have been reading on how I could serve static files not using my app engine app. One suggestion is to use Google Cloud Storage for serving the static files but I am not able to understand how I could set my DNS so that
www.example.com serves from Google Cloud Storage and www.example.com/api serves app engine app.
Another suggestion is to use dispatch.yaml and deploy two services, one pointing to the app engine app and another serving the static files, but again I am unable to figure out what the static file serving service would look like. Also does it deploy two services on the same instance or does it create two instances? I want to optimize for cost and not spin up another instance.
There is 2 solutions for minimizing cost.
The first one is to use Cloud Run instead of appengine flex. You can deploy the same container but you pay only when you are serving request. It's in beta but it's really stable. And you can use custom domain
The second solution, if you keep your app engine flex, is to deploy a second service. This second service will serve the static resources. Use standard appengine, and customize your app.yaml for serving only static resources. Here the doc for python 2 but the configuration is language agnostic
Serving static resources don't create instances. In any case, you have 28h of standard instance free per day.
I have many websites and also websites made by clients which I would like to optimize. I am currently using different CDN providers but I would like to simplify my workflow and hopefully also lower the costs.
I would like to have a CDN with a Pull Zone, and that CDN would also optimize the images (while not modifying the other static resources).
Ideally, I would also have access to statistics for each Pull Zone (since I would like to charge my clients for this service instead of guessing).
What are the different ways to do this with the Google Cloud? Is there a way to do this only using Google Functions, CDN, and Google Storage? Of course, I guess that having a little NodeJS app running to optimize the images would be needed as well. I just wonder about the general architecture and if it is even possible (I know it is with Azure and AWS but I am already running a few things on the Google Cloud).
Thanks a lot :)
In GCP a pull zone can be created by associating a HTTP(S) Load Balancer to a Cloud Storage Bucket and enabling Cloud CDN.
Having a different bucket for every client will break down the logs on your project, but not the billing for it.
To be able to separate billing you can always export the logs to a BigQuery and use it to break down the billing costs per client based on their use.
Regarding the optimization of the images, Google CDN will not perform any operation, neither GCS Bucket.
The only operation available in this direction is when using and serving GZip-compressed files.
I suggest you to dedicate one Instance to be able to prepare the images before storing or to add/replace the optimized versions of the images already inside the bucket.
I'm using PageSpeed for my app; I see that my css files are being combined into one but it uses google static content https://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/sx/s....
I need to have this final file loaded from my cdn (Cloudfront with active mapping to the same origin). It works on normal pagespeed installations on nginx.
How do I rewrite domains for pagespeed optimized file which is being loaded from google static server?
Thanks.
This may be confusing because there are several distinct PageSpeed optimization products:
mod_pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed are modules you install on your server, they allow you to rewrite resources onto any other domain (including your CDN).
PageSpeed Service is a service run by Google. You change your DNS to point to Google's servers and Google's serve the HTML and all the resources. When using PageSpeed Service, all resources get rewritten to the googleusercontent.com domain. I don't believe there is any option to change that to point to your CDN instead.
If you signed up for PageSpeed through App Engine, you are using PageSpeed Service and AFAIK there is no way to rewrite resources to a separate CDN.
Note that googleusercontent.com has many of the advantages of a CDN, it provides caching and low latency serving across the globe.
I find a lot of articles on the web describing how GAE can be used as a CDN. But, I could not locate any mention about CDN in Google's documentation of App Engine.
Can somebody please point me to some official document/article mentioning how applications developed on top of GAE benefit from Google CDN servers?
Thanks in advance :)
Yes, GAE uses google's infrastructure for static content.
Have a look at this session at Google IO 2009 and read slides 24-28.
The static content is handled by specialized infrastructure. App runtimes don't serve them.
Using App Engine as distributed file hosting isn't really an "official" usage of the service, so that's why it's never mentioned in any official documentation.
App Engine apps are served out of multiple Google production datacenters, so in theory your app will serve requests (more or less) as quickly as GMail or Docs.
If all your app does is serve static files, then you've basically got a free (to a point) CDN built on Google's servers.
Some googling finds many examples of how to accomplish this.