Is App Engine good for students?

[Bishop Zareh]

I am very familiar with Compute Engine, but rather new to App Engine.

My students currently use Heroku for the apps they build during the semester. They are able to create a free premeptable instance, which is perfect because they are the only person using the app. I would like to have them use GCP instead of the Heroku. 

I setup a fist test app on App Engine, and the bill unexpectedly came out to $15 for the first week. I stopped it and tried a new app with these app.yaml settings:

runtime: nodejs

env: flex

instance_class: B1

manual_scaling:

  instances: 1

resources:

 cpu: 0.01

 memory_gb: 0.5

 disk_size_gb: 0.1

health_check:

 enable_health_check: False

As near as I could tell from the documentation that is the least expensive App Engine app that is possible. With this configuration the price came down to $7 per week.

That is still too much for students to use. Once their $300 runs out, they will be paying an exorbanate amount of money to keep their coding examples online despite the extremely low traffic they utilize.

Is there a way to make a cheaper App Engine app?

They could create a preemptable compute instance for less money, but they seems like a lot of overhead for such a simple usage.

Any help appreciation,

BishopZ

http://bishopz.com

 

[Alex Martelli]

GCP's "always free" tier, see https://cloud.google.com/free/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=na-US-all-en-dr-bkws-all-all-trial-b-dr-1002250&utm_content=text-ad-none-any-DEV_c-CRE_201398096598-ADGP_BKWS+%7C+Multi+~+null_Google+Cloud+Free+Tier-KWID_43700021847830863-kwd-299036639748&utm_term=KW_google%20cloud%20free%20tier-ST_google+cloud+free+tier&dclid=CM7d_7Wt3NUCFcgHgQod-YgGkw , includes 28 hours per day of instance hours, so if only one small instance of the app is serving, it's free.

However, this applies to App Engine's *Standard* runtime, not the *Flex* one you're specifying. The main difference for your use case seems to be that Standard does not currently support nodejs -- just Python, Go, Java, and PHP. If this is a blocker for you, then I fear we don't currently have an always-free App Engine Flex solution (just App Engine Standard and Compute Engine).

Alex

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