Dart on AppEngine experiment 1 - avoid killer prices and use f1-micro instances


My first Dart AppEngine experiment doing a dummy HelloWorld turned out to be super expensive. Monitoring the project, 2 instances were always running, costing several bucks for doing...absolutely nothing...It seems that by default custom vm use a rather big instance.

Event worst, I was not able to stop these instances that kept restarting. The solution I ended up with was to upload a managed VMs (go in my case) dummy project instead where I could then make as the default and stop the previous instances in a proper way

I wanted to try running dart on a micro instance

Locally I managed to run my app using:

dev_appserver.py --custom_entrypoint "dart bin/server.dart --port {port}" app.yaml

and killing my app properly when needed using

pgrep -f dev_appserver.py | xargs kill -9

dev_appserver is actually detecting changes as I change my dart file and restart my server, however since it binds to the same port, it sometimes fails.

To deploy I can use the following app.yaml

runtime: custom
vm: true
api_version: 1

I want to deploy to my "tekartik-dev" project so I use

gcloud preview app deploy app.yaml --version tekartik-dev

The command being:

gcloud preview app deploy app.yaml --version 

My helloword project (https://www.dartlang.org/server/google-cloud-platform/app-engine/run.html) is working, however it is not using a f1-micro instance. The solution is to add this in app.yaml

vm_settings:
  machine_type: f1-micro

This is now deprecated and according to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/app-engine-managed-vms/2NNtkzeZm2U

so this can be used instead:

resources:
  cpu: 0.5
  memory_gb: 0.10
  disk_size_gb: 10

By default, there seems to be 2 instances running. you can reduce to one instance using

manual_scaling:
  instances: 1

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