I planning to create a NodeJS program, that work 24/7, that ping and make requests to an external server (outside of google cloud) every minute. Just to see that it the external services are are live.
If there is any error it will notify me by SMS & Email.
I don't need any front-end for this app, and no one needs to connect to it. Just simple NodeJS program.
The monitoring and configuration will be by texts files.
Now the questions:
It looks like it will cost me just $1.64. It sounds very cheap. Am I missing something?
It needs to work around the clock, I will request it to start it once, and it need to continue working, (by using setInterval). Is it will be aborted?
What it is exactly mean buy 1 instance. What an instance can do? Only respond to one request or what?
I tried to search in Google: appengine timeout, but didn't found anything that helps.
Free Quota
If you write your application in Python, PHP, Go or Java it can fit in free usage quota:
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
So there will be absolutely no costs to run it on Google App Engine platform.
There are limit of 657,000 UrlFetch API Calls per day (more than 450 calls per minute in 24/7 mode) for free apps. 4GB traffic may also be sufficient for this kind of work.
Keep in mind there is no SMS sending services provided by Google App Engine and you will need to spend additional UrlFetch API calls to use external SMS services.
Email sending is also limited to 100 Emails per day (or 5000 Emails to admin address), so try not so send repeated notifications about same monitored server every minute, or you'll deplete your Email quote in 1.5 hours.
Scheduled Tasks
There is no way to run single process indefinitely without interruption on App Engine. But you don't have to!
You'll need to encapsulate all the work you're planning to execute in every iteration into single task and then schedule it to run every minute with Cron. See this documentation for Python: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/cron
It is recommended to have some configuration page where you can set some internal configuration or see monitoring statistics, at least manage flag to temporarily pause tasks execution without redeploying your app.
I'm getting "Over Quota
This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later." on my GAE app. It's not billing-enabled. I ran a security scan against it today, which presumably triggered the over quota, but I can't explain why based on the information in the console.
Note that 1.59G has been used responding to 4578 requests. That's an average of about 347k per request, but none of my responses should ever be that large.
By filtering my logs I can see that there was no request today whose response size was greater than 25k. So although the security scan generated a lot of small requests over its 14 minute run, it couldn't possibly account for 1.59G. Can anyone explain this?
Note: mostly suppositions ...
The Impact of Security Scanner on logs section mentions:
Some traces of the scan will appear in your log files. For instance,
the security scanner generates requests for unlikely strings such as
"~sfi9876" and "/sfi9876" in order to examine your application's error
pages; these intentionally invalid page requests will show up in your
logs.
My interpretation is that some of the scan requests will not appear in the app's logs.
I guess it's not impossible for some of the scanner's requests to similarly not be counted in the app's request stats, which might explain the suspicious computation results you reported. I don't see any mention of this in the docs to validate or invalidate this theory. However...
In the Pricing, costs, and traffic section I see:
Currently, a large scan stops after 100,000 test requests, not
including requests related to site crawling. (Site crawling requests
are not capped.)
A couple of other quotes from Google Cloud Security Scanner doc:
The Google Cloud Security Scanner identifies security vulnerabilities
in your Google App Engine web applications. It crawls your
application, following all links within the scope of your starting
URLs, and attempts to exercise as many user inputs and event handlers
as possible.
Because the scanner populates fields, pushes buttons, clicks links,
and so on, it should be used with caution. The scanner could
potentially activate features that change the state of your data or
system, with undesirable results. For example:
In a blog application that allows public comments, the scanner may post test strings as comments on all your blog articles.
In an email sign-up page, the scanner may generate large numbers of test emails.
These quotes suggest that, depending on your app's structure and functionality, the number of requests can be fairly high. Your app would need to be really basic for the quoted kinds of activities to be achieved in 4578 requests - kinda supporting the above theory that some scanner requests might not be counted in the app's stats.
Some functions in the Google Developers Console, like the Analytics API, are free until you reach a quota. Other functions, like Google Cloud Storage, create costs from the first click.
When I upload a file under https://console.developers.google.com/ > Storage > Cloud Storage > Storage Browser and I make this file publicly available, I pay about $0.12 per GB traffic.
But theoretically the traffic to this link could explode, e.g. because of sudden popularity. Therefore I would like to set something like a daily or monthly cost limit.
Q: How do I protect myself from overly high costs in the Google Developers Console?
You cannot. I asked Google about this, here's their response, from May 7 2016:
(GCE = Google cloud engine. No spending limits.
GAE = Google app engine — yes it has spending limits.)
... you are eligible for support on ... only ...
... [various helpful links] ...
That been said, at the moment there is no a feature that allows you to
configure a limited budget on GCE. This feature is certainly available
for GAE [1]. As you mentioned in your comments, you either can totally
shut down your VMs (will depend on your use case) or set the VMs to
send you alerts if they reach a certain traffic limit [2].
Sincerely,
Someone's first name
Technical Solutions Representative
Google Cloud Platform
[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
[2] https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/support/notification-options
#wmdry, you wrote: "traffic to this link could explode" — I'm afraid of this too. That's why I asked Google about this. And I'm planning to avoid Google's CDN because of this, and use another CDN provider instead, which has spending limits. Because, unlike Nginx, I don't see any way for me to rate limit / throttle Google's CDN.
I do plan to use GCE (Google Cloud Engine) though. Therefore, right now I'm reading about how to rate limit my Nginx server. Because if I just configure Nginx correctly, then those $0.12 / GB you mentioned, cannot possible explode to ... like $10k in a month? What if Google sends a $10k bill when I'm back from an a few week's vacation, just because of my hobby project and a few people downloading a 1 MB movie over and over again forever (because: evil). Hmm, & the bigger & faster my servers, the higher the risk.
I hope Google will add spending limits, because I did want to use Google's CDN.
Update 2020: Apparently this does bite people from time to time — look here:
"Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt", Dec 08, 2020, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372336,
In that case, they could contact Google and in the end didn't need to pay.
As of July 2017 you can set budgets that send notifications via email but do not cap spending:
To set an alert-only budget, which will not cap spending:
Go to the Cloud Platform Console.
Open the console left side menu and click Billing
If you have more than one billing account, click the billing account name.
On the left, click Budgets & alerts.
Official help page: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6293540?hl=en
I found that Google's documentation now provides two methods to actually limit the cost of a GCP project. It involves the following setup:
Create a Cloud Function that checks the cost against the budget, and carries out a certain action if the cost exceeds the budget. Google's Documentation provides a sample code snip that can either shutdown all VM instances in a Project or disable the billing for a project. Shutting down all VMs would stop all VM-related cost but you get to keep your data (and still have to pay for the storage). Disabling the billing for a project would effectively zap all cost-related activities and you could lose data. You can name the Cloud Function "budget-enforcer".
The Google code snip as provided above has a hard coded ZONE variable. Remember to change it to match your zone!
Create a Service Account to run the Cloud Function "budget-enforcer". For shutting down VMs, the Service Account would need role "Compute Instance Admin (v1)". For disabling billing on a project, the Service Account would need role "Project Billing Manager".
Set a Topic for the Cloud Function (I call mine "proj-name-stop-vm" and "proj-name-disable-bill").
Set up a budget alert as usual, and connect it to one of the Pub/Sub topic above.
Please be noted that Google's documentation did mention that there could be a delay between the cost exceeds a budget and the function is triggered, so you should build in a buffer if you have an absolute hard cost limit. I use 90% of the budget as the trigger line for shutting down my instances.
The API usage can be limited with a hard limit:
Depending on the API, you can explicitly cap requests in a variety of
ways, including: requests per day, requests per 100 seconds, and
requests per 100 seconds per user. You might want to limit the
billable usage by setting caps. For example, to prevent getting billed
for usage beyond the free courtesy usage limits, you can set requests
per day caps
Source
You can combine budget pub/sub alerts with a cloud function that can disable billing on your entire account if a threshold is met.
Full Tutorial Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTg8RPpGG4
GitHub Repo Here: https://github.com/aioverlords/Google-Cloud-Platform-Killswitch
To Disable Billing
const _disableBillingForProject = async projectName => {
const res = await billing.updateBillingInfo({
name: projectName,
resource: {
billingAccountName: ''
}, // Disable billing
});
console.log(res);
console.log("Billing Disabled");
return `Billing disabled: ${JSON.stringify(res.data)}`;
};
Simply go to the developer console:
https://console.developers.google.com/project
Select your project.
Select "billings & settings"
Enable billing.
Then go to Compute/AppEngine/Settings and set a daily budget.
Go to Google Cloud console, and then to Billing / Budgets and Alerts and create a new budget for one or all your projects. You can select which services should be included in the limit and set a monthly amount that should not be exceeded.
Our hosting provider uses an app called AWStats for to give us data about visits/visitors etc. However when I compare that to my google analytics data the numbers are far off. For example AWStats says we had about 5000 visitors but GA says about 1500. How can I uncover the source of the disparity?
A few ideas:
Improper implementation for one or both analytics services
Different definition of what a visitor is for both analytics services. For example, does GA say that you have 1500 unique visitors? or 1500 visits?
Have you tried using a program like HTTPFox to look at the requests getting sent? Are there duplicate requests?
Yesterday my app has been visited 35 times by HUMANS. It seems however that a machine was crawling the website. I was overquota in a few hours (mostly frontend instance hours).
Today i pay max 5USD per day. For 35 real people it seems way too much.
I dont feel really good paying for crawlers that block the access to my website to regular users. 2 questions for you guys :
Is it normal that it happens?
What can i do to invest money in the real users instead of crawlers ? (and i am not talking about not referencing my app)
app : www.conceptstore.me
A well-behaved crawler should:
follow the rules in /robots.txt - so upload one. This alone should be enough.
provide a distinct User-Agent HTTP request header - so look at the User Agents automatically recorded in the App Engine logs, then return error pages for User-Agents you don't like.