Whitelist traffic to specific App Engine application

[Thanos Makris]

Hi,

We have developed an AppEngine application that serves as backend for a mobile application. We want to whitelist the URL of the application, so the mobile users would not be charged when using this application. 

However, we have the following issue. When the mobile application "hits" appname.appspot.com, the request is redirected to appspot.l.google.com and the response is sent from this URL. Thus, the users are charged for the data exchange. 

Is there any way to tackle this problem?

Thanks a lot!

[Barry Hunter]

Are you sure its redirected? That doesn't sound right. In fact I dont see how it can do, if it was redirected the hostname would go missing, and the hostname (containing the appname) is needed to route the request to your application (rather than the thousends of other apps runnong on appspot) 

There is a DNS CNAME, but its effectively an internal detail of how the DNS is routed. It's very common for sites to use CNAMEs to handle DNS - particully for routing requests via a CDN. It seems very odd that any whitelisting system would use an intermediate CNAME hostname for whitelisting. It should either use the original hostname (ie the hostname in the URL) or the final IP address. 

If the final IP you are out of luck, because Google uses many IPs for AppEngine. You need whitelisting on the original hostname. 

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[Thanos Makris]

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply! I will check it and see what happens. 

[Jeff Schnitzer]

As an additional bit of advice, you should *never* deploy a mobile app
with a hardcoded link to *.appspot.com or any other hosting-specific
domain. Buy your own domain and set up api.yourdomain.com. That way if
you ever want to move off of GAE, you won't need to set up proxies or
try to force-upgrade all your users.

I've seen this mistake made sooo many times with appspot.com,
herokuapp.com, etc... and the app owner is always kicking themselves
later.

Jeff

[Kaan Soral]

IMHO If you ever need to move out of GAE, you are already in deep s*, so a hardcoded mobile url would be a minor trouble  compared to your existing troubles.

But great advice anyway.

The only advantage of using *.appspot.com domain is: it has https, which is a big plus sometimes. (For example Facebook apps) Setting up SSL for a normal domain seems like a 1-2 day heavy job, considering GAE/Google Apps doesn't help.

[Vinny P]

On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 3:00:23 PM UTC-5, Kaan Soral wrote:

IMHO If you ever need to move out of GAE, you are already in deep s*, so a hardcoded mobile url would be a minor trouble  compared to your existing troubles.

But great advice anyway.

Agreed, plus you could always set up a simple servlet to do a HTTP redirect.  

 

The only advantage of using *.appspot.com domain is: it has https, which is a big plus sometimes. (For example Facebook apps) Setting up SSL for a normal domain seems like a 1-2 day heavy job, considering GAE/Google Apps doesn't help.

SubToMe just did an interesting writeup about how they enabled SSL for their GAE app: http://blog.superfeedr.com/asset-hosting-ssl-domain/ Worth a read, especially if you want SSL.

-Vinny P

[Jeff Schnitzer]

This very heavily depends on the application. Often migration involves
just moving part of the app - I've done this with one popular mobile
game, and partychapp had to do it as well.

It's worth the extra day (or whatever is needed)

Jeff