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.
Related
I am using Google Cloud Storage and I want to serve scaled images from it, Python 2 version of Google App Engine supported it via Images API but with Python3, they removed that API.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/python-differences
Cannot understand the intension behind removing such an import feature, upgrading to Python3 in Google Cloud environment sounds like a downgrade to me.
As you said, the proprietary App Engine APIs are not available in Python3.7. The main reason is because GCP is unbundling App Engine and now, you are no longer dependent on these APIs.
Currently, there are some third parties alternative solutions. In your specific case, and based on GCP documentation, I think that you can try to use Imgix or Rethumb.
Seems like Google is planning on adding it back to Python 3:
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/services/access
To reduce runtime migration complexity, Google Cloud now supports a set of App Engine bundled services and their associated APIs on second-generation runtimes, which include Python 3, Java 11, and Go 1.12 or higher. Your app can call bundled services APIs for second-generation runtimes through language-idiomatic libraries.
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
I am running a live system that is currently serving about 20K pages a day which is based on App Engine Helper (Python) with session support provided by AppEngine utilities.
One problem that I have been having is that sessions are occasionally randomly logging out. I would like to try using the App Engine Patch, since it has "native" django session support, but I am worried that this is possibly going to be like doing a brain transplant. Specifically, current database models are all inhereted from BaseModel provided by the App Engine Helper. While, App Engine Patch does not have this inheritance.
Does anyone know if it is possible to migrate a live system from App Engine Helper to App Engine Patch? If so, do you have any advice or warnings that I should heed, before attempting this transition?
Thank you and kind regards
Alex
After further investigations, I discovered that newer versions of Django and App Engine Helper have built in support for sessions. After migrating to this system, my problems of randomly losing sessions have been resolved.
Alex
You should think about porting your system not to App Engine Patch but to Django-nonrel (by app-engine-patch authors).
I moved from google-app-engine-django and app-engine-patch to Django-nonrel is because first two are not maintained any more.