There's a big drawbacks of Flex App Engine, comparing to Standard App Engine:
1. Deployment of a new version can take up to 30 minutes. It seems to do the following:
* Spins up two new GCE instances, that will build your code to a Docker image (and you pay for them).
* Uploads all of your code to those instances (even the files that weren't changed, contrary to Standard GAE).
* Then you just wait until it builds the code and deploys it to Flex environment.
In Standard env, only changed files were uploaded, and no extra building step occurred, so the whole process was less than a minute.
2. Static files -- now you have to manage them yourself: either serving them from server (bad), or, as they recommend -- upload it to GCS or any other CDN, and serve from there (good).
With Standard environment you just didn't care -- statics were served from some internal CDN (not touching your server), and were always in sync with your currently active code version. We're not ready for going that hassle now.
Deployments should not be taking that long at all if the app code is coming up healthy when it gets started on the VM (for crashes at code startup we also fail the deployments early). If the app comes up but isn't healthy (like serving 500 or not listening on the right port), we try multiple times to get the app started.
Can you share more information about your app and deployments so we can investigate further?
PS: It's worth mentioning we have active development to bring down deployments times and improve the deployment experience.
I've used GAE quite extensively at my last place of work and really liked it overall. I experienced some large pain points when I was unable to use libraries that used C extensions, which I guess should be solvable now. The GAE runtime was (is?) also only available for Python 2.7.
I wonder if there is a future possible migration path from the standard environment (Classical GAE) to the new flexible environment.
For our product we also decided to use the Google NoSQL database Datastore. Since this is/was tightly integrated in the GAE Python runtime, with its own data model layer, it was an easy choice to implement. But, of course, made migration away from the Google Cloud really cumbersome.
I guess you still are limited to use some of the Google Cloud Databases, but if you chose Cloud SQL maybe the migration is more feasible?
I hope that helps. A key tenet in the Flexible environment is portability. In the Datastore case, in particular, if you move to Cloud Datastore, that gives you portability across the Cloud Platform offerings or even if you want to run on premises or in a different Cloud provider.
App Engine Flexible is a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) with the mission that you bring the code and we do the rest for you. As an example, although we run the app as a Docker container, one doesn't need to understand Docker at all to get started. :-) It's a great place to get started without needing to understand how the infrastructure works. However, if you'd like to go beyond and provide your own Docker container, that works too. That is one of the exciting things we're making available with this new version.
In addition to App Engine Flexible, you can deploy Docker container to both Container Engine and regular GCE VMs in Google Cloud Platform. Each different offering will come with different set of features and different investment level on the user's side. A GCE VM will probably be the one with the ultimate flexibility on what one can do, but will typically require more time investment.
Regarding starting the container lazily and suspending it while inactive, that is not currently supported.
> Finally, the company will let developers bring a programming package (binary) to App Engine as a Docker image.
This sounds like someone could package up any piece of software (assuming that it's compatible with the underlying OS, of course) into a Docker image and deploy it on Google App Engine. This isn't limited to just programming languages.
1. Deployment of a new version can take up to 30 minutes. It seems to do the following:
In Standard env, only changed files were uploaded, and no extra building step occurred, so the whole process was less than a minute.2. Static files -- now you have to manage them yourself: either serving them from server (bad), or, as they recommend -- upload it to GCS or any other CDN, and serve from there (good). With Standard environment you just didn't care -- statics were served from some internal CDN (not touching your server), and were always in sync with your currently active code version. We're not ready for going that hassle now.