There's a big drawbacks of Flex App Engine, comparing to Standard App Engine:
1. Deployment of a new version can take up to 30 minutes. It seems to do the following:
* Spins up two new GCE instances, that will build your code to a Docker image (and you pay for them).
* Uploads all of your code to those instances (even the files that weren't changed, contrary to Standard GAE).
* Then you just wait until it builds the code and deploys it to Flex environment.
In Standard env, only changed files were uploaded, and no extra building step occurred, so the whole process was less than a minute.
2. Static files -- now you have to manage them yourself: either serving them from server (bad), or, as they recommend -- upload it to GCS or any other CDN, and serve from there (good).
With Standard environment you just didn't care -- statics were served from some internal CDN (not touching your server), and were always in sync with your currently active code version. We're not ready for going that hassle now.
Deployments should not be taking that long at all if the app code is coming up healthy when it gets started on the VM (for crashes at code startup we also fail the deployments early). If the app comes up but isn't healthy (like serving 500 or not listening on the right port), we try multiple times to get the app started.
Can you share more information about your app and deployments so we can investigate further?
PS: It's worth mentioning we have active development to bring down deployments times and improve the deployment experience.
1. Deployment of a new version can take up to 30 minutes. It seems to do the following:
In Standard env, only changed files were uploaded, and no extra building step occurred, so the whole process was less than a minute.2. Static files -- now you have to manage them yourself: either serving them from server (bad), or, as they recommend -- upload it to GCS or any other CDN, and serve from there (good). With Standard environment you just didn't care -- statics were served from some internal CDN (not touching your server), and were always in sync with your currently active code version. We're not ready for going that hassle now.