Google Cloud Libraries for Appengine Standard

[Eric Martineau]

Java8 opened up the possibility of using google-cloud-java (grpc) libraries within AppEngine standard.  The newer libraries are nicer to work with from a development standpoint, but I'm not sure if there are any significant drawbacks to using them within AppEngine Standard.

Can anyone provide guidance on how to approach the inclusion of GRPC libraries in AppEngine Standard Java8?

Specifically, I'm thinking of two things:

- Push/pull subscriptions for PubSub

- StackDriver Logging

[Jordan (Cloud Platform Support)]

Other than the fact that the new Google Cloud Client Libraries are mostly currently in Beta, it is actually recommended to use the new Client Libraries (as it is also now supported in the App Engine Java 8 environment). 

The reason being is that they are able to run outside of App Engine Standard in any environment (e.g App Engine Flex or on client-side applications) unlike the App Engine Standard APIs (which only work within App Engine Standard). As Cloud becomes more customizable and containerized, being able to deploy your code on different types of clusters across different services in different containerized environments is the new standard approach for Cloud application design. 

For example, using the new Client Libraries will allow you to deploy your application on Google Kubernetes Engine if you end up wanting to take advantage of the amazing cutting edge Kubernetes technologies. The engineering team is also working very hard on the new Client Libraries in attempts to make it fully GA.

Since they are new, documentation and samples are still in the making. You can use the Google Cloud documentation for Stackdriver as a guide, and the actual Stackdriver Github and Pub/Sub Github guides for help on implementation.  

- Note that because some of the libraries are still in Beta, it is recommended to report any issues or feature requests directly to the engineering team in their Git Issue Tracker (e.g for Java).