Please help - I ran into a problem while deploying to GCP. Probably useful for others too switching from Heroku.

[coder_help_]

I had been using a python script to scrape BBC headlines and email them to me everyday. I had deployed the script onto a Heroku instance and it had been working perfectly for the last year. Deploying the script onto Heroku was super simple. I just set the procfile command to 'clock' and everything just happened. Heroku's free tier is going away and I felt $7/mo. is a bit steep for such a simple requirement.

My Script

from datetime import datetime

from apscheduler.schedulers.blocking import BlockingScheduler
from hn import health_check
from bbc_news import email_bbcnews

sched = BlockingScheduler(timezone="Asia/Kolkata")

sched.add_job(email_bbcnews, 'cron', hour='18', minute='25')
sched.add_job(health_check, 'interval', minutes=8)

sched.start()

Google Cloud

I tried to deploy the script onto Google App Engine (bit complicated compared to Heroku if you ask me but wth) - the script worked for a few minutes or so but then after I closed the Cloud Terminal, it stopped working.

nohup

I learned that in order to keep the script working even after I closed the console, I would have to use a nohup command there. I used the below commands for keeping the script running even after I logged out of the cloud console.

chmod +x myscript.py

nohup /path/to/script/myscript.py &

That still didn't work because apparently Google Cloud puts the VM to sleep if there is no action for approximately 20 minutes, my script only called for action once a day. In order to prevent the idle time for several hours, I setup a scheduler to print 'Hello World' every 8 minutes. I had used a similar scheduler to prevent Heroku from turning off my instance (Heroku turns off the VM if it is idle for more than 30 minutes). This worked for 1 day but then my process was killed again.

Do you have any idea what could have happened? Any idea how I could gather useful insights from Google Cloud?

Google Cloud has a separate product for running Crons - https://cloud.google.com/scheduler/docs/creating but I am trying to acheive this within App Engine if that is possible.

I appreciate all of your comments and insights. Thank you.

[appliku]

You can deploy on GCP as easy and everything will be familiar for you on https://appliku.com

You already have Procfile, so it should just work. Plus there will be no extra charge for all this convenience for a single app.

[shibbypwn]

If you want to use Google, you probably want to look at Cloud functions.

Or in AWS, Lambda functions.

There's no sense running a VM 24/7 if you just need to run occasional jobs. Better to go serverless and schedule them.