google cloud compute engine time out window

Question

I have a process (Python) which is running more than 10min. Initially thought of running in Google cloud App Engine, since it has 60 sec time out window planning to run in google compute engine. But I come to know that compute engine also have 10min time out window, but I couldn't find that information in internet.

So thought of checking, Please let me know whether google compute engine also has time out window?

Thanks,

Answer 1

App Engine Standard

App Engine standard environment has a 60 second timeout for HTTP requests and 10 minute timeout for tasks in task queues . App Engine standard runs on a specialized sandboxed environment.

There is also some info here about various DeadlineExceededError messages you could get in App Engine standard and how to handle them.

App Engine Flexible

App Engine also provides an alternate environment (App Engine Flexible aka Flex) which in turn runs on Google Compute Engine (GCE) VMs. It has a timeout of 60 minutes . It also provides more flexibility in terms of languages and runtimes.

Both of the App Engine environments (Standard and Flex) are managed Platform-as-a-Service environments (as in, you need not worry about spinning up the underlying infrastructure and managing them). Google App Engine takes care of this automatically.

You can look at the comparison of App Engine Standard vs App Engine Flex .

Directly using GCE VMs

When you use Google Compute Engine (GCE) VMs directly, they do not have any associated timeouts (except for preemptible VMs which I've described below). A GCE VM will be fully managed by you and you control how long the instance runs.

There are times when your VM can be Live migrated due to ongoing maintenance events, which BTW is mostly transparent to you and your application running on the VM. Your machine could restart at times due to hardware failures which is out of your control, but that's where you need to make your application resilient to such failures. In fact by using App Engine , these details are abstracted from you and fully managed by Google.

Preemptible VMs

Preemptible VMs are lower cost and short-lived GCE VMs which have a maximum duration of 24 hours and can be terminated even before that if GCE wants to use the underlying resources for other purposes. This is more useful for processing batch workloads where there is no strict latency requirements.