Using Google Accounts for Authentication and Google APIs in Compute Engine

Question

The Google App Engine standard environment allows easy integration with Google accounts for user authentication, Cloud Datastore and with APIs such as Gmail API, Google Calendar etc.

Are these same features available in Compute Engine also? I mean can I deploy a web application in a Tomcat container in a Compute Engine VM and use Google Accounts for authentication, Cloud Datastore for persistence and APIs such as Google Plus and Google Calendar for reading users' personal information?

I found this URL that says Cloud Datastore can be used from Compute Engine but could not find similar documentation about usage of Google Accounts for authentication and usage of APIs like Google Plus and Google Calendar.

Answer 1

Yes you can.

You can use all Google APIs (Gmail API, Google Calendar etc) from tomcat and from any other web container. You simply need to provide the credential to connect to the Google APIs. HERE how can you obtain the credential on a server side web application, please note that the documentation it's not referring to any specific web container.

Appengine provides out of the box a simpler way to authenticate Google user through the UserServiceFactory. This service it's not available outside the AppEngine Enviroment because it comes with the AppEngine SDK.

In order to use the Google Cloud Datastore from outside of the AppEngine environment you need to use the Remote API. With this api you will be able to access the Datastore service.