[google-appengine] The end of PaaS ?

[Patrice B]

It seems most of the services that made AppEngine a proper Platorm as a 
Service are now scheduled to be shut down, and users are advised to 
migrate.   Migrate search to ElasticSearch, migrate memcache to Redis, and 
maybe at some point we'll be asked to migrate Ndb to MongoDB and GCS to 
whatever.   I'm not complaining about the way the process is handled 
actually, there is enough time to consider the options and work on a 
migration scenario, there is no imminent deadline, at least for the 
moment.   But I'm wondering what went wrong with the PaaS approach, and is 
it officially dead.

Is this the end of GAE as a PaaS ?   I truly believed PaaS was the future 
of cloud architectures:  stop thinking in terms of servers, start thinking 
in terms of services.   When I started working with AppEngine, I dreamed of 
CPU as a service, with no server granularity, and I was disappointed to 
find I still had to worry about servers, starting up a new server instance, 
choosing what type of instance would be best, a scaling strategy, etc.   I 
was expecting servers as a service, i.e. serving my requests without me 
ever thinking in terms of servers.   But at least there was Ndb, search, 
memcache, GCS and a few more.

Now it seems all of these are on their way out, which makes me wonder: was 
there something wrong with the concept of PaaS itself, or is it just that 
these products didn't gain traction, and are now too costly to maintain 
with regards to their user base ?   Actually, the one thing that was wrong 
with Paas from the very beginning was that it would lock a project into a 
given cloud.   That was a risk to be reckoned for users, but it could have 
been seen as a feature for the cloud provider.   Now is it for this reason 
that the mentionned services didn't make it ?  Because users would have 
been wary of being locked in, and for that reason would prefer to use 
leading products deployed on leased servers ?One thing is for sure: 
once an application has migrated to more standard services, it will not be 
tied to GCP anymore.

There was a major benefit to the PaaS concept:  it was very cheap for 
startups.   Deploying ElasticSearch on a the smallest possible cluster will 
start at around $200 a month, while the search usage of a small application 
could cost less than $10.   Same for the shared memcache service offered by 
AppEngine.   Now you are having to pay for running servers all night with 
very little transactions to handle. 

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this matter ? 


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[google-appengine] Re: Operation not complete. Waiting to retry. -> ERROR: (gcloud.app.deploy) Error Response: [13] An internal error occurred.

[Dario DCG]

Thank you George,

As you suggested, I've opened an issue in the tracker, including all the 
information that you mentioned.

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[google-appengine] Re: The end of PaaS ?

['George (Cloud Platform Support)' via Google App Engine]

Hello Patrice, 

Your perception about App Engine as PaaS scheduled to be shut down is 
unjustified: there are no such plans at the moment, nor are there chances 
the PaaS offer gets abandoned, not for the foreseeable future. 

Products on this list 

 
are migrated: Task Queue to Cloud Tasks, Cron to Cloud Scheduler, Memcache 
to Memorystore, Datastore to Firestore, and Search to ElasticSearch, to 
make them available and ready to use outside of GAE. In other words, the 
intention is to not restrict products on this list to the App Engine SDK.

Now with GKE, Cloud Run, and other Cloud provider computing solutions, it 
only makes sense to allow for these other platforms to take advantage of 
the products previously only GAE could.

Worthwhile mentioning that, while the Engineering Team migrated these 
products outside of GAE, they also took it upon themselves to improve them, 
which is why there may be some difference in the new flavors of these 
products. 

As a side note, GCS is not tied to App Engine, and therefore does not 
require any migration. 

There is still a product that qualifies fully as PaaS: Cloud Functions. It 
is the true PaaS product: Developers do not need to worry about instance 
configuration at all.


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[google-appengine] Re: The end of PaaS ?

[Patrice B]

Thank you for your update and insight.Maybe I was seeing a trend where 
there is none.   

Actually, there are two separate considerations:  (1) some products are 
replaced by other products, generally for the better, and developpers 
should plan for migration, this is life I guess, and it's ok as long as 
there is enough anticipation and not too profound disruption, it's fine.   
(2) in at least two cases (search and memcache) the replacement product is 
not a pure API, not "as a service", it has to be deployed on a number of 
server instances, whereas the former product was a simple service.   

Maybe it's not a trend, maybe just two isolated cases.   But it does have 
adverse consequences in terms of increased cost and of increased complexity.

The Datastore to Firestore migration, on the contrary, seems to be in 
perfect continuity, both in terms of api (when the Python 3 api comes out 
of beta) and of billing (I have not looked much into that later point 
actually).

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[google-appengine] Error with "Stackdriver Debugger API" after deploying Java App

[Emanuel]

I've done another deploys and all was fine, but after finishing the app, 
I'm getting this error. And the page request keeps loading.
Do I need to configure something in "IAM"?

Java 11
Standard Environment
h2 DB
Spring boot

The stack trace from Google Cloud:

"message": "Stackdriver Debugger API has not been used in project 
929024293238 before or it is disabled. Enable it by visiting 
https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/clouddebugger.googleapis.com/overview?project=929024293238
 
then retry. If you enabled this API recently, wait a few minutes for the 
action to propagate to our systems and retry.",

java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 403 for URL: 
https://clouddebugger.googleapis.com/v2/controller/debuggees/register at 
java.base/sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream0(HttpURLConnection.java:1919)
 
at 
java.base/sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1515)
 
at 
java.base/sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl.getInputStream(HttpsURLConnectionImpl.java:250)
 
at com.google.devtools.cdbg.debuglets.java.GcpHubClient.registerDebuggee 
(Unknown Source)



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[google-appengine] Re: The end of PaaS ?

[Kaan Soral]

As a long time App Engine user and still being a believer, I can't help but 
feel similar to Patrice's original feelings and confusion

One related issue: 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/appengine-ndb-discuss/xOuhDFiYKbU - 
On this migration path, we were being instructed to use a 3rd party Redis 
service

When mail was deprecated, again we were instructed to use 3rd party mail 
services

As most App Engine users, I used App Engine as I wanted an all in one 
service, where I can just "import" whatever I wanted, and use them, without 
worrying about a "perfect integration" - I wanted most edge case scenarios, 
retry scenarios etc. to be handled by App Engine

so TL;DR of my points:
[1] (Major) Everything should be in-house, which includes Google Cloud
[2] (Important but Minor I guess) Even if we use other Google Cloud 
services, their integration should be native or almost native

If I needed to give one example to [2] - I'd say for the storage, the 
buckets that App Engine references could be auto created, so a new user 
wouldn't have to deal with all the permissions, setup etc. - that's usually 
the tricky part of a cloud service, they could just take an example code, 
run it, and be "Voila!"

As [3] - Another recent gripe I have is the perceived lack of grip over App 
Engine, If I needed to give one concrete example, I recently discovered 
that end users could see 500 errors, yet you would never observe these 500 
errors in App Engine logs, it took a considerable amount of effort to track 
these, prove they existed, after back and forth, turned out they were 500 
errors from the network layer, and they "just didn't propagate" - so after 
all that effort, there was no solution, they still don't propagate, I feel 
like it's a major breach of trust on all fronts, but no one cares ... Back 
in the day, the engineers cared, we used to have Google Hangout's, they 
listened, they responded, now I also feel like App Engine is just becoming 
an old instance scaling service

With all these said, I still love App Engine, and on day to day usage, no 
issues lately

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