Why do I get 503 Service Unavailable errors using the Google Cloud Datastore API explorer?

6
votes

I submitted the following request using the API explorer in the Google Cloud Console:

{
"query": {
"kinds": [
{
"name": "Car"
}
],
"filter": {
"propertyFilter": {
"property": {
"name": "car_name"
},
"operator": "equal",
"value": {
"stringValue": "Honda"
}
}
}
}
}

And I got the following response:

{
"error": {
"errors": [
{
"domain": "global",
"reason": "backendError",
"message": "Backend Error"
}
],
"code": 503,
"message": "Backend Error"
}
}

I've authenticated with OAuth as well. Why won't this work?

1
google-app-enginegoogle-cloud-datastore
Have you enabled the Cloud Datastore API? You can check by visiting console.developers.google.com, clicking on your project, then APIs & auth -> APIs. - Ed Davisson
Yes, the Cloud Datastore API is enabled. - 2daaa
You might want to try with the API explorer, run EXACTLY that query, and see the message it creates. Sometimes you think your message is properly formatted (which it looks like it is), and it turns out there's an extra "repeated" field that means you need another [] bracket somewhere. Looking at what the API explorer does will help finding out your differences. - Patrice
The query and response I posted in the question are from the API explorer. - 2daaa
It turned out to be a problem with our specific application that Google had to fix. I don't have any real visibility into what exactly they had to do to fix it. - 2daaa

1 Answers

5
votes

I see these errors myself sometimes. AFAIK, this basically says "You did everything right, but Google is having some trouble handling your request."

If you see this happening a lot, you should check status.cloud.google.com to see if there are any known issues.

In short: there's not much you can do about a 503 Backend Error. :(