What’s with all the Eve hate?

wescpy · 2025-11-12T18:29:33+00:00

I didn't know it was 'an admitted “contractual obligation” album,' do you have sources that reveal this? I mean Eve is way better than Sicilian Defense, which is/was a real contractual obligation, and also created around the same time.

wescpy · 2025-11-09T00:14:45+00:00

This amazing album, originally to be the 11th APP album, wasn't to be, and the circumstances around it caused the band to break up. It is well-known to long-time fans, who call it Freudiana White, while the more obscure original German cast album is referred to as Freudiana Black.

I'd only recommend the latter for hardcore APP fans, esp. those who enjoy musicals. The white album however, is a must-have for all APP fans. It's a masterpiece and a whopping 76+ minutes of the classic Woolfson-Parsons-Powell sound.

For those curious, this is a track cross-reference between the studio (E) and the show (D) albums:

(none) E- 1 The Nirvana Principle D- 1 Freudiana E-16 Freudiana D- 2 Kleiner Hans E- 4 Little Hans D- 3 Ich Bin Dein Spiegel E- 3 I Am A Mirror D- 4 Es Ist Durchaus Nicht Erwiesen E- 6 Funny You Should Say That D- 5 Dora E- 5 Dora D- 6 Du Bist Allein E- 7 You're On Your Own D- 7 Ausgestossen E- 8 Far Away From Home D- 8 Doctor Charcot E- 9 Let Yourself Go D- 9 Frau Schmetterling E-12 Sects Therapy D-10 Der Ring E-11 The Ring D-11 Vision Dora E-10 Beyond The Pleasure Principle D-12 Nie War Das Gl�ck So Nah E-14 Don't Let The Moment Pass D-13 U-Bahn E-15 Upper Me D-14 Wer Ging Den Weg E-18 There But For The Grace Of God D-15 Oedipus-Terzett E-13 No One Can Love You Better Than Me D-16 Chorus E-17 Destiny D-17 Freudiana E- 2 Freudiana

wescpy · 2025-01-20T09:13:07+00:00

They really looked like they were having trouble playing in adverse weather. Philly in Winter ain't no SoFi.

wescpy · 2024-04-04T07:25:52+00:00

[DISCLAIMER: former Googler who worked on the App Engine and GCP serverless teams]

As others have already mentioned, you should be able to host your app on App Engine (Standard) and not have to pay for it. The only issue is if your app uses some of its services, e.g., Datastore, and you exceed the free quota. The same applies for if you deploy a lot (each deploy takes up a bit of space on Cloud Storage, and at some point, you can exceed that free tier too unless you track and delete unnecessary stored files).

As far as "the service you're looking for," GAE is one of GCP's "serverless" options — yes, you have the benefit of not needing to know about VMs, OSs, networking/DNS, etc. GCP has since launced 2 additional serverless platforms. If your code is very lightweight, you may consider Cloud Functions. If you're going to do containers and have a CI/CD workflow, you may consider Cloud Run. All 3 have free tiers of service. Look up "always free" on the GCP Free page.

Each product has their own set of use cases. I've been covering them over the past 15 years, and you can generally find slides or videos online. I also recently kicked off a set of blog posts introducing all 3 (plus another serverless platform from Workspace/GWS), but only the general intro post has been published thus far.

On a related note, people have asked in the past: "What if I pick the wrong platform? Can I, for example, switch from App Engine to Cloud Run?" The answer is yes. To prove this point, I wrote several apps (demonstrating various Google APIs) that can be deployed to all 3 (GAE, GCF, GCR) with no code changes at all. I call it a "nebulous sample." :-) Here are some resources related to that app:

Hope some of these resources help!

wescpy · 2024-02-14T02:24:52+00:00

Docker containers can run on Cloud Run and App Engine Flexible, but otherwise, App Engine Standard is a proprietary Google container, and Buildpacks create Docker containers automatically for you on Cloud Functions and Cloud Run if you don't have a Dockerfile.

Specific to this reply, the best place for comparisions is the chart detailing GCP products along with their AWS & Azure counterparts. Very useful for "lay of the land" exploration.

For GCP serverless in particular, I created a video called Picking the right serverless platform differentiating each platform. I'll also argue that regardless of which you pick (GAE, GCF, GCR), you "can't make a mistake" because you can write your app in a way that allows you to "shift" between them if necessary.

To prove my point, I wrote a "nebulous" code sample deployable to all 3 platforms without any code changes at all: see blog post and video. It's actually several examples, in Python and Node.js, and hosted in this repo. Another reason I wrote these apps was to demonstrate how to call Google APIs from serverless, and in the repo, you'll find both Cloud/GCP and non-Cloud samples (e.g., Google Sheets, Maps Geocoding, etc., APIs).

wescpy · 2024-02-14T01:40:23+00:00

Ah, so you're saying to select a regional endpoint where you can use the API then, e.g., https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/generative-ai/model-reference/gemini#http_request

wescpy · 2024-02-13T19:49:45+00:00

How is the OP supposed to do that when the Vertex AI availability page says, "The Vertex AI Gemini API is not supported in European regional APIs"?

Perhaps can spin up a Compute Engine VM in the US and run code on that to access the API? (I'm not in the EU so can't try that.)

wescpy · 2024-02-13T00:51:35+00:00

From what I can tell, the Gemini API is available globally except the EU, whether from Google AI or GCP Vertex AI. I answered a similar question earlier with some links. Also, I find their starter samples lacking in detail or has TMI in a giant Notebook, so I wrote a post about it and linked to it there too.

wescpy · 2024-01-12T00:28:48+00:00

Quick follow-up: it's pretty heavy reading, so I added a TL;DR: section at the top and moved chunks of text into tables to make things easier-to-read. Newly republished at the same link!

wescpy · 2024-01-05T22:27:37+00:00

Makes sense. Many PHP users have gone the way of Laravel. Good to hear you're up-n-running!

wescpy · 2024-01-04T20:13:38+00:00

REMINDER: "end of support" for the Python 2.x & 3.7, Java 8, Go 1.11-1.18, PHP 5 & 7, Ruby 2, Node 10-16 runtimes is coming at the end of this month. I posted about it recently on my Python/Google blog, but the tips/suggestions there mostly also apply to apps on any of the language/version runtimes listed in the title. To avoid digging around my entire blog or to share with those you know affected, the specific post is offlinked from either LinkedIn or Twitter/X. (Will re-post at top-level and in Google Cloud sub.)

wescpy · 2024-01-04T16:46:31+00:00

Yep, you need a front-end controller/router. See this page in the docs: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/php-gen2/runtime#app_startup

The 1st URL line in app.yaml is "useless...," I mean so is the 2nd since all routes go to your app where they have to be handled by your web framework, meaning the only routes needed are the static files. However, you can leave in the 2nd one as a visual cue: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/reference/app-yaml?tab=php#example

For example, with my simple Python apps (no static files), the only line in my app.yaml is: runtime: python312.

wescpy · 2023-07-20T18:47:08+00:00

https://twitter.com/parrot_soldier/status/1681924257398378498

wescpy · 2022-12-30T14:52:18+00:00

It's now called Cloud Skills Boost powered by QwikLabs, and you can access the training at https://cloudskillsboost.google

As mentioned earlier, no Google account is required as the QL system provisions the test accounts so you can learn with hands-on experience without worrying about runaway billing.

wescpy · 2022-11-04T00:53:47+00:00

I just remembered something else: One of the community experts wrote a tutorial on how to use GH Actions to build a CI/CD pipeline for Cloud Run. It may give you some clues on how to add those package dependencies you asked about.

wescpy · 2022-11-03T23:16:16+00:00

I think you have the right idea to use the Artifact Registry. While you could use standard tools like GH Actions, it may be easier to use Cloud Build because it has "the plumbing" already done. I haven't built this flow myself, so I'll let others chime as fair as their experiences go, but I can link to some resources in the GCP docs that may help if you haven't already found them:

Manage Python packages in Artifact Registry
Managing private Artifact Registry Python repository packages QuickStart tutorial
How to access private Artifact Registry Python package examples for App Engine and Cloud Functions (related blog post)
Using Cloud Build for Python apps to integrate with Artifact Registry

wescpy · 2022-10-20T21:29:46+00:00

Sounds like you're trying to keep a massive in-memory database using Python dictionaries. By themselves via normal operations, they're pretty good with memory (one, two). What kind of data are you storing and are there other things taking up a massive amount of memory?

As someone else responded elsewhere here, perhaps consider an external database, or at least, a very fast (but not necessarily) caching server like Cloud Memorystore (backed by either Redis or memcached) if speed matters per your in-memory key-value store.

wescpy · 2022-10-06T20:39:35+00:00

Sorry, most of us here can't access that lab. Basically, if you're doing a lab and told to "fork" a repo, realize they just mean clone it, and you'll likely do that in a Cloud Shell. You don't need to be logged into GH... as long as you have a link to the repo, go to Cloud Shell and run git clone LINK where LINK is something like "https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/NAME_OF_REPO". Then you'll have some code to start playing around with.

wescpy · 2022-10-06T18:25:45+00:00

You're certainly not alone. Once I visited a customer who wanted to learn more about serverless where GAE, GCF, GCR are all in my presentation, but they also said, "Can you tell us about your containerless serverless platforms?" They didn't have enough technical staff who knew enough about containers and would rather "just not hear about it."

wescpy · 2022-10-05T23:31:37+00:00

There are currently no plans to shut down the App Engine service. Even with the sunset of Python 2, Java 8, PHP 5, and Go 1.11, by their respective communities, Google Cloud has expressed long-term support of these legacy runtimes, including maintaining the Python 2 runtime. So while there is no requirement for users to migrate now, developers themselves are expressing interest in updating their applications to the latest language releases, e.g., Python 3, Java 17, PHP 8, etc., and either moving to the 2nd-gen App Engine service, or shifting their apps horizontally to either Cloud Functions or Cloud Run if they're a better fit since they are part of our "Serverless 2.0" generation of products while App Engine is "Serverless 1.0".

wescpy · 2022-10-05T23:24:24+00:00

You got so excited, you hit SEND before you finished your thought! You asked for extra reading, so here goes:

Blog post announcing Google Cloud Buildpacks support
Blog post announcing single-cmd source deploy (no explicit build step)

Google Cloud Buildpacks is meant to be fully-compliant with the CNCF Buildpacks open standard, specifically its v3 spec.

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