Micro service deployment and configuration on appengine

[Abe Junejo]

Some basic newbie questions :

1) Is is possible to externalize microservice configuration when using google appengine, such that the configuration is not part of the microservice source code itself, but resides somewhere outside ?

2) Is it possible to let google appengine compile java code, instead of deploying a pre-built service/application?

Would appreciate any help

Thanks!

[Blaine Garrett]

If you deploy your microservice to a separate module (or whatever they're called now) you can share appengine resources between your default module and service module. This includes data store, memcache, etc. So depending on where you store your settings, they should be able to be shared across modules.

If you don't need/want runtime settings (editable via forms, etc) you may consider a pre deploy build step that compiles your settings into your module's native code. Store them in a JSON or yaml file that both code bases can read from as part of a build step. The downside to this is that different versions of different modules can have different sets of settings depending on when the settings changed relative to the respective build steps. This can also be a benefit over runtime settings... In addition to the RPCs involved with reading from data store, etc.