migration from google app engine to google compute engine

Question

So google compute engine was announced yesterday and the prices for processing power are much better than the app engine standards. Anyone have any idea what the migration would look like or if we will be able to use the new google compute virtual machines with our current app?

Answer 1

At Google IO the team showed a demo where GCE VMs were being dynamically spun up from within a GAE app. I recommend you watch that session and download the code sample to get a better understanding of interop between the two services. The session us posted on YouTube on the Google developers channel there

Answer 2

App Engine (AE) and Google Compute Engine (GCE) are different tools, so they'll have different specs and pricing models.

With GCE, you can choose how many servers to run, when to run them, what software stack to install on them, etc. It's a lot of power, and not only you can choose how to run them, you also must choose how to run them.

AE on the other hand makes all of those decisions for you: The running stack, turning servers on and off depending on demand, distributed persistent storage, etc.

So before deciding to migrate the question you have to answer is: Do you want the freedom (and responsibility) of running your whole stack? Or would you rather let App Engine take care of the scalability details, while you focus on coding your app?

Answer 3

After reading the Answers/comments above, it is now evident that GAE app is not straight-forward ready to be deployed on Compute engine. I fully understand that what all the managed services(mostly as APIs be it, datastore, document/index Search, memcache, cloud storage, task queues, cron jobs etc.), App Engine offered being a platform, won't be the same-fashioned accessible/integration-ready if available on Compute engine at all.

We have a 5 years old fully-grown App engine app now. I am considering a scenario to support high-level of customization/control and adding third party softwares/middlewares to our server environment which is not possible with App engine. So if we have all solutions(Compute Engines, Container Engines etc.) other than App engine, to migrate our application to meet such requirements, what is the cost of such migration?

1. Need of server provisioning and configuration at Compute engines with different pricing model[Understood, should not be a problem :)]

2. Full or partial code rewrite to continue using the same APIs esp. Datastore, Cloud Storage, Task Queues, Cron jobs, Document Search, Memcache etc.[Need confirmation here and any reference/link to migration guide would be help!!]

3. Does this lead to risk of losing any managed service/API offered from App Engine? Document Search, Memcache, Task Queues, Cron jobs seem the possible candidates. Please confirm.

4. As per my reading, Big Query, Cloud storage, Pub-Sub APIs integration should not be much affected with such migration(Client-libraries or Rest APIs should still help!). Please confirm.

In nut-shell, We wanted it fully managed in the beginning so PaaS seemed the right choice 5 years ago. Now we want App minus platform-managed plus customized/flexible to our choice. How complicated this transition is going to be?