[justinblat]

Apologies you had a bad experience. There's no doubt the original App Engine had some... quirks.

You may want to take a look at Managed VMs. All of the new runtimes are based on Docker images, are entirely extensible, and don't require the use of the original App Engine APIs:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/

You can use whatever Database or NPM modules you want.

[hypertexthero]

It's great to see App Engine getting better! I'm exploring it again after trying the original app a few years back and am enjoying the improved interface and abundant documentation and tutorials.

One suggestion: Make a cloud storage product option free up to a few megabytes for hosting small personal sites. Maybe it exists already but I haven't found it.

[glaberficken]

You can easily run a small personal site on the free tier of GoogleAppEngine. Just google for "app engine static site"

There are a ton of options on what you can achieve inside the free tier. But the simplest one for the use case you seem to require is to author a static html site in a good WYSIWYG html editor and then deploying it as a static site in GAE.

[hypertexthero]

Thank you — I will try this!

Edit: My use case is to move a couple of static sites to a host that supports a secure HTTPS connection by default, which App Engine seems to do: <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/console/using.... I'll try moving one of my sites over and set up SSL with with a certificate from <https://letsencrypt.org/>.

[jfoster]

Does Google still patch the stack (kernel, web server, interpreter, database, modules, etc.) whenever security issues are discovered? I always thought that was one of the best bits of the App Engine model.

[dlor]

Currently we patch all the software on the VM, but not the application container itself. We make new base images available, but the user has to re-deploy to pick up these changes.

[jfoster]

Is there any notification (email, readable VM version on a server, etc.) when one of those redeployments should occur?

[edwinnathaniel]

Hi Justin,

I'm currently trying to get my feet wet on GAE. Judging from your statement, are you suggesting that people should look into Managed VMs and maybe skip the regular GAE (or known as the original GAE)?

Perhaps the original GAE will be deprecated in the future?

[boulos]

No, that's not the case. Managed VMs is a more flexible environment than our "GAE Standard" environment, but (at least currently) comes with some of the tradeoffs of a full VM (startup time, minimum size, etc.). If you've got say a vanilla python app that doesn't need custom native modules, GAE Standard is great! If you want to run something we don't currently support, then Managed VMs gives you the flexibility a Compute Engine VM can offer you (run whatever you like).

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not App Engine but I'm familiar enough with their thinking.

[edwinnathaniel]

Thanks for the info @boulos. I've been watching GCP division quietly building solid products and ecosystems while the limelight shine towards AWS and Azure to some extend.

I'm also very excited to see GCP people responding to any GCP questions and/or clarifying its past "reputation" with a calm manner ;). Clearly the tide has changed (probably comes from the top too? :)).

Me and my partner are planning to invest a significant amount of time to the GCP ecosystems!