NodeJS Flexible Environment automatically shuts down itself after deployment

[Soravis Prakkamakul]

We are currently hosting our services on NodeJS Flexible Environment for AppEngine by deploying it into multiple services inside one single project. 

Recently, we've ran into a problem deploying app engine services. Our instances will shutdown 1-2 minutes after deployment with the command 'gcloud app deploy service.yaml'. Here are the simple steps to reproduce the problem

1. Start off with hello world NodeJS Example which can be found in

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/nodejs-docs-samples/tree/master/appengine/hello-world

2. Replace package.json with the package.json file used in our project

https://gist.github.com/5un/93090537d95b1e23e15e373e8454635f

replace app.yaml with this file

https://gist.github.com/5un/a8305da775bc1547e228f34854f8aff5

It's simply setting the service name and determine automatic scaling settings

3. Deploy with the command

 gcloud -q app deploy app.yaml --promote --version=1 

4. Monitor all the logs regarding this service in Google Cloud Logging console. 

App will startup successfully, according to the log entry

 vm_runtime_init: ah_start: INFO: got healthy response from app, sending /_ah/start query.

After a while, there will be a message saying that the app is shutting down for system halt

gae-hello-1-2vyk shutdown[7196]: shutting down for system halt

The full log can be found here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fyd7Cxr4NpNm5IZUtUb2hGNzA/view?usp=sharing

We're suspecting that our dependencies in package.json made the deployment take longer than expect and soemehow triggered gcloud to terminate it as this is not the case with the default package.json file came with the hello world project.