Use Google App Engine, but minimally, focusing on static site publication with minimal backend automation.
Since its inception, the Service Infrastructure Book has run on Google App Engine, and various versions of the agent.io web site have and continue to use App Engine.
Currently agent.io runs on App Engine as a purely static site. The backend is capable of dynamic features (license generation), but these are disabled on App Engine and users are referred to a clone of the site at agentio.dev on a dogfooding Digital Ocean droplet with Nomad and IO.
Pros#
- App Engine is inexpensive, with costs that roughly correspond to usage of underlying Google services like Cloud Datastore. Sites that don’t use Datastore are effectively free.
- App Engine is extremely stable. Google just keeps it running.
Cons#
- Deployment is slow (several minutes to push an update).
- Domain usage requires verifying a domain with Google (a bit slow, depending on DNS propagation time)
- Domain usage requires Google-generated SSL certs (could take many hours to fulfill).
- We can’t use IO on App Engine (We could use App Engine as an IO backend, but that doesn’t seem to be useful).
- App Engine is suspected to be unofficially deprecated.