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Google App Engine fiasco :-(
3 points by narayanb 3547 days ago
Never used App Engine before, was always on AWS.

Recently for my Andriod app, I thought of giving GAE a try. The app was on Firebase, the only "Server" I needed was to send a push notifications (Downstream). So, I just went "Google Cloud Module" wizard with "Endpoints" option on Android Studio.

And created this simple servlet.

/ * An endpoint class we are exposing / @Api( name = "pushApi", version = "v3", namespace = @ApiNamespace( ownerDomain = "com.example.sample", ownerName = "com.example.sample", packagePath = "" ) )

public class MyEndpoint {

    PushBean response = new PushBean();

    /**
     * A simple endpoint method that takes a name and says Hi back
     */

    @ApiMethod(name = "pushToTopic")

    public PushBean toTopic(@Named("topic") String topic, @Named("dataJson") String dataJson) {

        try{
            response.messageTopic(topic,dataJson);
            return response;
        }catch(Exception e){
            return null;
        }
    }
}

And deployed this on my backend. After 1 month of running in staging (I hadn't published the app yet and I would have called the end point around 1000 times), I got a bill of around $450. It said I had consumed around 8600+ hours of GAE instance. I almost fell of my chair when I saw that. Even if my instance ran all through the month, it could have only cost 720 hours.

I am just wondering what happened. What am I missing here? Did I do anything stupid? Can someone help me?

2 comments

It sounds to me like you are on Google Compute not Google App Engine. If you are running on App Engine you would have a *appspot.com domain. Unless you setup a domain with App Engine.
I don't think so. This is what my billing statement says -

App Engine Backend Instances: 8146.607 Hours (Source: [h-56])

There are also two App Engine backends... Standard Environment and Flexible Environment. See here (upper left):

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs

Flexible runs on Compute whereas Standard runs on the well known App Engine.

You can put a limit on spending. I"ve had a mistake from billing from them that they rectified. I'm sure you've take the step to contact them.