Specify Zone for Google Cloud App Engine Flexible Environment

Question

Question: Is there a way to Specify Zone for Google Cloud App Engine Flexible Environment to reside in? If not, what are the alternatives?

Context: I'm having a setup where I use App Engine to write and reads to Bigtable. However I noticed a performance decrease, and during the debugging, I found a documentation from Google stating:

There are issues with the network connection. Network issues can reduce throughput and cause reads and writes to take longer than usual. In particular, you'll see issues if your clients are not running in the same zone as your Cloud Bigtable cluster.

In my case, my client is in a different region, by moving it to the same region had a huge increase in performance. However the performance issue still exist, and the recommendation from the documentation is to put client in the same zone as Bigtable.

I also considered using Container engine or Compute Engine where it is easier to specify the zone, but I want stay with App Engine for its autoscale functionality and managed services.

Answer 1

App Engine is a regional service:

App Engine is regional, which means the infrastructure that runs your apps is located in a specific region and is managed by Google to be redundantly available across all the zones within that region.

Taken from here.

You could indeed use GKE or GCE, while you're correct that these are not managed services like App Engine is, they do both support autoscaling.