Hi Folks,
In regards to autoscaling with the flex environment, what sort of spin up time can be expected? In other words, once the scheduler decides to create new instances, how long before that instance is ready for traffic? I am working with Java 8 with a small - medium sized application, but insights from other runtimes are welcome.
We've tried GAE Standard with Java 8, however have been completely dissatisfied with the autoscaling in the Java environment. Start up on new instances take 9+ seconds, and there does not appear to be a way to keep user facing requests from hitting a cold start. I've tested with resident instances and cron jobs for "always on", but just does not appear to be possible. Plenty of other antedotes in this group to assure me that preventing a user facing request from hitting a cold start (or heavy latency due to startup not complete) is simply not possible on GAE Standard. If I'd know this up front, I would have choosen Go, or python. If Google would be more up front about this situation it would help many devs and the GAE as a whole.
So investigation is now if the flex environment can serve traffic without a user facing high latency due to an instance starting up. Also curious in the time it takes to start instances. One speaker at Cloud Next said a couple of minutes, which is much higher than GAE standard.
Patrick Jackson