I'm a Devops Engineer - I must wrestle GAE to the ground - Hints and Tips Please

[Mister Guru]

I'm trying to do some research on GAE - I've inherited the responsibility of maintenance of the infrastructure, and to my delight, (or horror, depending on how you see it), not much documentation existed regarding setup, configuration etc. This means that I have to take the time to learn, document, and script using GAE.

I checked out reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/gae/ - Which made me very sad, I was hoping for a vibrant community of users.

I'm not a developer, I'm a system admin person - the one thing that is grinding my gears at the moment, is deployments.

I'm a little upset that I can't just go <here GAE this is a new .war - Go run it> From what the devs have told me, deployments are integrated into Maven build process ... already I was like ... *huh* - I don't even know what that means. anyway, I digress,

I'd like to know Is the only way to deploy to GAE via the maven build job? It would be a 'shame' if that's the case, but as I'm not up to speed with how java apps are suppose to work, best practices and such, I'm not sure if I'm the one looking at it incorrectly. I've also got a few other questions, but I'm testing the water with this first. I could easily run our workloads on Kubernetes or Mesos, so I'm judging GAE purley on the people who use it! (very professional and scientific, I know!)

If there are any other devops guys in here specifically working on deployments and scripting around GAE, I would like to have a word with you - maybe exchange ideas etc

Thanks,

[Prakash A]

Hi Mister,

Glad you put your eyes on GAE datastore. During my initial days also, I faced the same issue of understanding the GAE. However, its one of the easiest tool to understand. Just like a excel table in JSON, thats how its saved.

For me its one the greatest DB concept, where you can have infinity rows of data. Adding and changing properties (columns) is of ease. However, you should be clear on Indexing the properties, which you shall be clear during the birth phase of the DB.

Since, I am developing in MAVEN, I could not provide any examples. However, my wishes for you to succeed.

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey Mister Guru,

The subreddit is not actively monitored by Cloud Platform Community Support as far as I know, so it's natural that it'd be quite inactive. However, we do actively monitor:

* this forum and a handful of other Google Groups related to the Cloud Platform,

* a whole lot of relevant tags on Stack Overflow / Severfault, and

* a bunch of Public Issue Trackers (App Engine, Cloud Platform, Google Cloud SDK, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, to name a few)

So you definitely aren't alone if you want to discuss high level and general topics, get help with technical questions, or report issues (to go in order of the above by their purposes).

As far as deploying WAR files, you can deploy unpacked war files (a war folder) using the appcfg tool. In getting used to the platform in general, you should make use of the mountains of documentation on all kinds of topics that you might want to learn about. For someone new to the platform, I'd recommend going through some tutorials, or reading some of the main docs from the side-bar of the docs site.

I hope this has been a helpful introduction to the community at a glance and a quick response to your question about maven deployments and war files. Let me know if there's anything else I can help with!

Cheers,

Nick
Cloud Platform Community Support

[Christian F. Howes]

I have not deployed java, but using the technique that Nick mentions below to use appcfg on "war folders" makes sense.  I use appcfg for python deployments, and my team and i have scripted the crap out of it!  if your dev team can deliver you the compiled java code you should be able to get scripted deployments running pretty quickly.

cfh