Moving to GCP

[lipis]

We are keep getting more and more errors from Heroku, so in general we are investigating to move away.

Rationale for moving to GCP

We are already using the following services from Google:

• Google domains
• Storage Server (GAE)
• Persistent rooms (Firebase)
• Google Search Central (former Webmasters)
• Tracking (Google Analytics)
• Our own stats (Google Analytics API)
• Google Workspaces (soon)

So instead of getting yet another service like DO or AWS, why not continuing adding to GCP, since we already have bunch of things there and one active billing account.

Pros

• Same Google account to access dashboards & deploy
• Auto scaling by Google :)
• Faster responce times than Heroku (source: https://status.excalidraw.com)
• Migration is basically done with this PR

Cons

• The only issue is that it might be pricey. We still need to investigate that, and we potentially could get some free credits from Google for our tests.

Either case we shouldn't reject something just because it's a bit more expensive, especially if it offers benefits and we should never care about the performance and downtimes.

---

To test this PR on GCP

• https://excalidraw-git-gcp.excalidraw.now.sh
• https://excalidraw-portal.uc.r.appspot.com

Useful links

• https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/nodejs-docs-samples/tree/master/appengine/websockets
• https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs
• https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/using-websockets-and-session-affinity

[kbariotis]

@lipis we can't have multiple instances of this app unless we configure them to be able to talk to each other socket.io servers right? Am I missing something?

There is more information here.

[dwelle]

@kbariotis The goal is to replace the heroku server, not to add another server on top.

That said, while we can move to GCP temporarily to improve perf, we'll want to use a different host because the pricing of GCP App Engine is criminal (unless we put the instances to sleep if unused, but long-term (even short-term) that's not gonna be a solution because the traffic will be unyielding).

But, mid-term we'll want to use several instances for sure.

[kbariotis]

@dwelle sorry I should have link to the code. I meant this horizontal scaling. I'm personally not sure how the app will handle multiple instances.

[lipis]

I have some updates about GCP.. it might be a bit cheaper than we think :)