I have been testing Discourse on both DO and Google Compute, and have been leaning towards the latter. Their CDN, DNS, storage, speed, etc is impressive, plus everything is built in which makes everything easier. Its slightly more expensive for certain things, and a little bit more complicated to understand than DO through, but its a solid product.
Has anyone here tried Google Compute? Any experiences with regards to Discourse, good or bad?
I’m running my little instance there, and it’s working fine.
Thats nice to know. Im running a 2 vCPUs, 7.5 GB, 60GB SSD machine running on Ubuntu. What is your setup like? I was getting a lot of spikes with a single core so shifted to dual.
By the way, are you using their Instance groups/templates option? I had some trouble with their ephemeral IPs with that option.
I’m still on the single core one, but my community didn’t take off, so you can’t compare 
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I’m using the simplest form, just a compute instance, open ports and a single public ip.
A tip for anyone configuring email on Google Compute - 587 is blocked (you might be able to enable it through the firewall settings but Im not sure). I used 2525 with Mailgun, and its working nicely.
@Falco Wanted to ask you something regarding Google’s cdn if you are aware. I know if you use Google Storage it acts as a cdn and Im using it to serve static images through a bucket (www.hostname.com) and CNAME. Regarding the instance itself, I have enabled CDN in the load balancing section, but not sure if it gets enabled if you are using a single instance (as we are) versus a group instance (which can be added as a backend in the load balancing section). Do you have any knowledge regarding this? Thanks!
We’re on GCE - have setup one instance which runs discourse.
Down the road, I want to test it out by creating a separate data+redis / web container and using the autoscale functions.
Have a long way to go. 
@shri The issue I ran into while trying the autoscale functions was that I couldn’t get a static IP with them. But with the single instance I am still trying to test if their CDN is working. Do you have any info on this?
You can configure your load balancer with a static IP. Been there done that dozens of times.
CDN - Not used it, prefer CloudFlare as they have better features and do not charge by the GB.
Added: Not sure how Cloudflare works with discourse.
@p16 - updated –
Here’s a screenshot - you can create an IP address which remains static. You can also create static IPs for your GCE instances. (Looking at this reminds me … I’ve forgotten how to put http and https on the same LB.
@shri i did set up a static IP using that method but it wasn’t forwarding it to my instances. Did you have that issue? As for the https and http, just click on the blue button just below in your screenshot and add https and include your ssl certificate as well.
No clue why. And I’ve never done this for single instance - whats the point of a load balancer (ssl termination?). CDNs are cheaper than the Google LB+CDN.
Generally we build the image, create a group template, setup the group and then setup the LB to point to the group.
If I get time over the next few days, I’ll try setting one up and post instructions.
I did that, but had no luck. Im going to try one more time and see if something changes. I am using them since its just very convenient - you can adjust your instance as you like, use their DNS, storage and CDN. From the four CDNs that I tried, Google was the fastest, closely followed by Fastly and then Keycdn and Cloudflare.
