Does Google App Engine (Flexible) Support Google Endpoints?

[Bill Li]

Hi, I have used Google Endpoint on Google App Engine Standard environment before, and I think it is easy to use. But I did not find any documentation on how to deploy Endpoints on Google App Engine Flexible Environment. Do anyone has any idea about whether we can use endpoints on flexible environment?

From my research, it seems that the Google App Engine SDK is only used by Standard mode, and the endpoints need support from Google App Engine SDK. So I am wondering whether this means the Flexible Environment does not support Google Endpoint?

Thanks for any answer!

[Zdenko Hrcek]

I bumped into issue week-two ago. Now it took me like half hour to find documentation where it is described. based on this https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/python/migrating-an-existing-app Google Cloud Endpoints are not supported in Flexible environment (and about half of services from standard environment (just wander why they call it python-compat (compatible)).

This can be big deal for migrating existing web apps from standard to flexible. For one client I wanted to migrate from Standard to Flexibile to reduce instance cost but because of missing support of some services I gave up. 

Not sure if the support gonna change, but it's good to take that into account even when developing new applications. I bet not many people don't know about this. 

Zdenko

[Nicholas (Google Cloud Support)]

You are correct that there is no documentation on Google Cloud Endpoints within the App Engine flexible environment.  As posted by Zdenko, they are not supported at this time.  Though it may work in some cases, there's officially no support for this and it should not be relied upon.

If you would like to see Endpoints implements into the flexible environment, feel free to file a feature request on the App Engine public issue tracker.

Hope this helps.

[Robert King]

Sorry if this is harsh and correct me if i'm wrong.
I think google should take a stance on this. You can't just say "feel free to file a feature request". Google should decide if endpoints make sense or not and if not, apologies to existing developers using it & put a warning in the documentation for people new to app engine. I've been pretty disappointed with google apis, I suspect google doesn't use their own apis internally, and that their apis are just a quick and dirty wrapper around what they use internally (for example, how many full time engineers are there working on making google api clients nice?). For example look at the javascript client library that's not out of beta since 2012 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-api-javascript-client/sfxFLTI8h6Y
You would think they'd have a nice typescript version too for each api. Perhaps they're waiting on firebase integration and there is conflict with firebase auth etc, who knows?

[Jon Parrott]

Robert and everyone: we hear you. Please keep in mind that App Engine Flexible is still in beta, and the Python compat runtime itself is in alpha. We're still doing a lot of work on both and we're still collecting user feedback. Things like this mailing list and the public issue track are some of the ways we collect feedback, so while it may appear dismissive for us to say "file an issue" - we do take those seriously.

Regarding endpoints itself: I can't speak any definite plans, but I can stay that we are investing in endpoints and that you should stay tuned.

In the meantime, I would recommend looking into "hybrid" applications - use app engine services (neé modules) to have one service running on standard that works as your API frontend, and another service running on flexible that can handle the heavy lifting. 

[Robert King]

Thanks Jon

Good to hear there are plans for investing in endpoints. I would say being able to easily build APIs is fairly fundamental and is a high priority. There is a lot of work that could be done to the api explorer, testing, and api clients. Having typescript definitions would also be really nice.

I like that you can swap out backends although I'm having to use go-endpoints which is not an official package and comes with no guarantees or support
I do run seperate modules which is nice - Although It does impact instance hours which generally puts you over the free quota. Perhaps 15 minutes to startup a go module is a bit harsh since go is very quick to startup.