Slow deployments (NodeJS)

[Cepit Space]

Hey everyone,

I was wondering if someone could tell me if 10minute deployments for App engine are normal.

I have a simple CI setup with gitlab.com using the google/cloud-sdk docker image, which executes the following.

    - gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file $KEY_FILE
    - gcloud app deploy app.yaml --quiet --project $PROJECT_ID

 My app.yaml looks like:

runtime: nodejs
env: flex
manual_scaling:
  instances: 1

If someone could let me know if this is the norm or if there is anything I can do to improve the time here, that would be great.

(The equivalent of app engine on a different service took ~2minutes)

[Kenworth (Google Cloud Platform)]

Yes, this seems to be totally normal. Like discussed in this SO thread, most of the deployment steps happen away from your computer and are independent of your codebase size, so there's not a lot you can do to speed up the process. 

[Cepit Space]

Thanks for the response,

While I can understand it's all done on the GCP side. Why does CI need to sit waiting?

Another point I wanted to add was that if my code is uploaded  with a bug (that causes a panic), the deploy just hangs until I cancel it.

[Kenworth (Google Cloud Platform)]

The command-line (Cl) is waiting for a callback to be able to show the status of the deployment. You can use the '--verbosity' flag set to 'debug' to be able to see more what's happening on the background.

I have found these pages of interest about best practices for Docker files and speeding up the Docker builds.