Direct HTTP requests inside the network between Node.js services in AppEngine Flexible

[Epä Järjestys]

Hello!

I have read that it is possible to issue direct http requests between services within the same project inside the AppEngine network, without traversing the internet, using the URL Fetch Service. But it seems this is only available in Python, Go and PHP.

Is there any way to make this work in Node.js?

I.e. would something like this work to get the local IP address inside a service and then let it be fetched once by any other service who would like to use it to make subsequent calls go through the local network?
I suppose that in that way, if it would work at all, I would get the IP address of the specific service instance, not some internal address to the service's load-balancer. Correct?

I would really like to have just any kind of hack to make this work somehow, to make internal requests to the load-balancer of another service inside the same AppEngine Flexible project.

Any help or information appreciated.

[Katayoon (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hi, The URL Fetch service is not available for Node.js on App Engine Flexible. However, for cross-service communication, you can send HTTP requests to a service by including its name in the URL or use Cloud Pub/Sub. You may use the Google Cloud Client library for Node.js to access the Pub/Sub service from a Node.js app.

Access to a Flex app is through the HTTP(S) load balancer which currently does not have the ability to access to IP addresses (since it doesn’t provide static IPs). I should add that HTTPS load balancer for GAE Flex provides a public IP address. When you route to that IP address from a Flex instance, you are going out of the GCE virtual network and then back in again.

To have accessible internal IPs for your resources, you may consider working with Compute Engine and setting up Internal Load Balancing.