CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-app-enginedartgoogle-cloud-platform
Cristian Garcia
Cristian Garcia

Reputation: 9859

How to configure App Engine for minimal cost?

I'm doing a prototype backend and in the near future I expect little traffic but while testing I consumed all my 300$ free trail.

How can I configure my app to consume the least possible resources? I need things like limiting the number of instances to 1, using a cheap machine, sleep whenever possible, I've read something about Client vs Backend intances.

With time I'll learn the config that best suits me, but now I need the CHEAPEST config to get going.

BTW: I am using managed-vms with Dart.

EDIT

I've been recommended to configure my app.yaml file, what options would you recommend to confront this issue?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2228

Answers (4)

alexamies
alexamies

Reputation: 430

Lowest Cost for a simple app: Use App Engine Standard. It scales to zero instances, so will not cost anything if there is no traffic. With App Engine Flex you will pay for the instance hours and the Flex (GCE) instances are bigger.

Use autoscaling with max instances, F1 instance class: With autoscaling you do not need to guess how many instances you need. F1 are the smallest instances. Set the max instances in case you get DoS'd or more traffic than you can afford.

Stop Instances: You can stop the App Engine versions when you do not expect the app to be used. The will be no charge for instance hours for either Standard or Flex. For Flex there will be disk charges. The app will be ready to go when you need it again.

App Engine Version Cleanup: Versions are easy to create and harder to remove. Here is a post on project cleanup. See this post on App Engine cleanup https://medium.com/google-cloud/app-engine-project-cleanup-9647296e796a

Upvotes: 1

Dmytro Sadovnychyi
Dmytro Sadovnychyi

Reputation: 6201

If you use managed VM -- you'll be billed for Compute Engine Instance prices, not for App Engine Instances, and, as I know, the minimum possible instance to use as Managed VM is "g1-small" which costs you $0.023 per hour full sustained usage (if it will be turned on all month), so you minimum bill will be 0.023 * 24 * 30 = $16.56 only for instance hours. Excluding disk and traffic. With minimum amount of datastore operations you may stay on free quota.

Upvotes: 2

Ying Li
Ying Li

Reputation: 2519

There are two train of thought for your issue.

1) Optimization of code: This is very difficult for us as we are not privy to your App's usage and client-base and architecture. In general, it depends on what Google App Engine product you use the most, for example: Datastore API call (fetch, write, delete... etc...), BigQuery and Cloud SQL. Even after optimization, you can still incur a lot of cost depending on traffic.

2) Enforcing cheap operation: This is easier and I think this is what you want. You can manually enforce a daily budget (in your billing setup page) so the App never cost more than a certain amount per day. You can also artificially lower the maximum amount of idling instances to 0 and use the smallest instance possible (F1 for frontend).

For pricing details see this article - https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#Billable_Resource_Unit_Costs

Upvotes: 2

Jeff Deskins
Jeff Deskins

Reputation: 1660

Every application consumes resources differently. To minimize your cost, you need to know what resources used the majority of your expenses and go from there.

If it is spent on extra instances that were just sitting there - then trim the number of instances to the minimum required and use a lower class instance. If you are seeing a lot of expense on datastore calls - then look at optimizing your entities and take advantage of memcache.

Upvotes: 1

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