Google Compute Engine for Web Server or App Engine

Question

I need to better understand the technology stack of Google Cloud services.

Imagine you were to build a site such as imdb, or rottenttomatoes or metacritic.

So you have apps that list movies. Other apps that let you +1 or -1 recommendations or enter in review scores.

You have an app that lets you login.

Then you have all these HTML web pages that get served up, along with graphics and other reasources for the display of the web pages.

I know Google App Engine can serve html and I can add resources into the /web folder. So it seems like I could do an entire site on GAE.

Then, what is the advantage of also creating a Google Compute instance?

I created a Google Compute instance this afternoon, installed apache, setup my domain forwarding. I wonder, should I use this in combination with GAE or is it unnecessary?

Answer 1

If you only need to host some small scripts and some static content, Google App Engine it's definitely the way to go. By using App Engine, you let Google take care of security patches, replication and recovery, scaling and content caching.

Google Compute Engine is useful if you need to run additional non-webserver software to support the functionality of your site.

For example, if you need to run a Postges database, or Reddis/Cassandra/MongoDB to store user information and ratings. Google's Datastore and MySQL work well for some types of applications, but there are a lot of different database types for different needs.

Another good reason to use Compute Engine is if you need to load and keep a lot of data in memory or perform "big data" analysis. Examples of the former would be ElasticSearch or Lucerne, and the latter would be Hadoop, Hive and Pig.

Of course, you can run your frontend on App Engine and then use Compute Engine later if you need it, which is what I'd recommend.