How to increase the 20 rules limit in dispatch.yaml

[Soeren Balko]

Hey Google,

I have tried to get this out of your support and sales channels, so far not receiving a response:

We have embraced your interpretation of "micro services" on GAE, using your module/service concept extensively. This is mostly to (1) segregate semantically separate functionality, (2) work around GAE limitations (different SSL config needed to call AWS and Google APIs), and (3) to still be able to use shared resources, namely the data store and memcache. 

Long story short, we are now hitting the 20 rules limit for routing rules in dispatch.yaml for our production and staging GAE apps. Can someone from Google please advise:

[  ] Increasing the limit from 20 to, say, 50 can be done and the cost for that is $... (for 3 GAE apps).

OR

[  ] The 20 rules limit in dispatch.yaml is a hard limit that cannot be changed.

Either of the two answers would at least give us certainty. I cannot believe that nobody in your support or sales departments has been able to answer this question for us (paying customer). Maybe an engineer can?

Thanks,

Soeren

CTO Clipchamp Pty Ltd

[Jordan (Cloud Platform Support)]

With more dispatch rules comes more CPU and memory resource requirements per app. Therefore there is indeed a hard limit, but I think it is a bit more than 20 (maybe 30?). It is recommended to file a Quota Increase Request to have a conversation with support to gauge the requirements of your application and its quota needs. 

Ideally it is recommended to design your application to abide by App Engine quotas as they are set to protect the overall underlying architecture. Treating other micro-services as backend services and directly routing requests to them using their full target address via your main frontend default service is the recommended approach. This way you only have to maintain the URL requests to your main frontend client-facing default service, and not every service. 

[Soeren Balko]

Thanks, Jordan - increasing the limit to 30 would already help a lot for now. Not sure what causes the memory consumption blow-out, I would have thought that some glob expressions do not take up much main memory. And as I said, we are happy to pay for the extra resources you need to provision. Or use the load balancer service, if it was made available for GAE (it seems to be limited to your IaaS offerings atm). 

We will explore the direct addressing method, even though I am not fully clear how this works with custom domains/SSL certificates.

Soeren

[Soeren Balko]

OK, so we submitted a quota request - even though there is technically no category for dispatch.yaml rules. Thank you for suggesting this! Let's see how this goes, its no less than our 5th (!) attempt to make the Google Cloud division answer our inquiry, which is beyond ridiculous. Just to list what I did:

* Contact the sales form in the Google Cloud console, asking for a quota. Never got a response.

* Managed to track down a local GCP representative. Nice guy, but could not answer our request either.

* Tried phone support, got almost stuffed up by first-level support, who promised to pass it on. Never heard back.

* Posted the question here, thanks for the response Jordan - direct addressing by bypassing dispatch.yaml is unfortunately not an option for us.

* Now put in a quota increase request with elaborate justification and all - let's see what happens.

I hope someone from GCP reads this and re-thinks their approach. We are dual-using AWS, which is an entirely different experience. More mature, much better documented.

Soeren

CTO Clipchamp Pty Ltd

[Jordan (Cloud Platform Support)]

Yea, only by filing a quota increase request can a quota be increased, as it is sent to the only team that handles quotas. Sales may have been able to route your case to the quota team, like-wise for the support phone call you made, but the most direct and correct route to the team is via the form. 

I checked and found your quota request and I went ahead and notified the agent who is handling it of this groups thread in order to emphasize its importance as a one-off courtesy. I also see that it has already been escalated to the engineering team to investigate increasing your dispatch rules, so lets hope they can do this for you. 

[Soeren Balko]

Thanks, Jordan - we received a response and they declined to increase the limit beyond 20. Anyway - we figured that Google Cloud Endpoints in combination with the direct module/service addressing scheme in GAE may be a viable alternative.

Thanks for helping out!

Soeren