# Hello from Gitpod! (installing on google cloud + automated dev setup)
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/hello-from-gitpod-installing-on-google-cloud-automated-dev-setup/128783
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Created:** [September 17, 2019, 11:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hello-from-gitpod-installing-on-google-cloud-automated-dev-setup/128783 "2019-09-17T11:54:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@jankeromnes](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jankeromnes)
#### Post date: [February 23, 2020, 9:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hello-from-gitpod-installing-on-google-cloud-automated-dev-setup/128783/22 "2020-02-23T09:04:26Z")
Quick update, in case that’s helpful to anyone – we’ve successfully deployed Discourse on Google Cloud! 🎉 It’s running on [https://community.gitpod.io](https://community.gitpod.io) and we’re loving it so far.
### Details
I mostly followed [INSTALL-cloud](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md), and created a `g1-small` GCE VM (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory) with an additional 20GB SSD. (Note: I originally considered a `n1-standard-1` VM, but it seemed a bit overkill for Discourse).
For the VM’s location, based on [this blog post](https://medium.com/@sachinkagarwal/public-cloud-inter-region-network-latency-as-heat-maps-134e22a5ff19), we’ve determined `gce-us-east4` to be the best location, since most Gitpod users are in North America and Europe, but also a lot in Asia, so latency shouldn’t get too bad there either.
For the email setup, we _really_ wanted to use our Google Apps account. We’ve tried to [configure a Gmail SMTP relay](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en), but even after triple-checking that we were using all the correct protocols and allowed them through GCP firewall and got the correct IPs whitelisted, no email ever went through. Discourse Doctor was a great help, but didn’t succeed either. So eventually we gave up and used [SendGrid](https://sendgrid.com/) instead, because we wanted to evaluate it anyway for other things. It was super easy to set up and worked on first try. FYI, our Discourse traffic is growing, but still easily fits within SendGrid’s free tier (100 emails / day).
We then set up GitHub OAuth login (the same as for [gitpod.io](http://gitpod.io), for convenience) and installed a few useful plugins:
- [discourse-solved](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-solved) to mark questions as resolved
- [discourse-chat-integration](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-chat-integration) to notify about new topics in our internal Slack support channel
Also, for the anecdote, I wrote a quick and dirty [spectrum-to-discourse.js](https://gist.github.com/jankeromnes/dcd9bd8cd1a3df2d32d8541adb7758f2) nodejs script to transfer our old Spectrum threads over to Discourse. The quality isn’t 100% optimal, and there may be a few bugs left in the script, but this was enough to seed our new Discouse. We now manually review/fix/improve old topics when we see them becoming popular.
Hope all this info may help someone in the future! 🤞
---
### Author:  [@jankeromnes](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jankeromnes)
#### Post date: [February 23, 2020, 9:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hello-from-gitpod-installing-on-google-cloud-automated-dev-setup/128783/23 "2020-02-23T09:26:16Z")
> [@KajMagnus](#):
>
> > [@jankeromnes](#):
> >
> > We currently use Spectrum for our community, but we have some troubles with it
>
> Hi Jan, if you have time, I’m curious about what were the problems / didn’t work out the way you had hoped, with Spectrum?
Sure! I’ve shared more details with you via PM. 🙂
---
### Author:  [@jankeromnes](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jankeromnes)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2020, 10:50am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hello-from-gitpod-installing-on-google-cloud-automated-dev-setup/128783/24 "2020-02-26T10:50:33Z")
> [@jankeromnes](#):
>
> Also, since our mission is to fully automate all dev setups (at least for open source projects), I’d like to contribute a fully-automated setup for Discourse, allowing contributors to start a ready-to-code Discourse environment online in one click (as opposed to reading through long lists of setup instructions and manually installing/configuring a bunch of dependencies on your current device).
FYI, I’ve now opened a Pull Request for this: [DEV: Add fully-automated dev setup with Gitpod by jankeromnes · Pull Request #9026 · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/9026)
I hope you’ll like it. 🙂
---
### Author:  [@jankeromnes](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jankeromnes)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2020, 2:36pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hello-from-gitpod-installing-on-google-cloud-automated-dev-setup/128783/25 "2020-06-09T14:36:30Z")
> [@jankeromnes](#):
>
> and created a `g1-small` GCE VM (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory) with an additional 20GB SSD. (Note: I originally considered a `n1-standard-1` VM, but it seemed a bit overkill for Discourse).
As a quick update, Google Cloud is now recommending to increase the performance of [our Discourse instance](https://community.gitpod.io) due to “high memory utilization”:
> This instance has had high memory utilization recently. Consider switching to the machine type: custom (1 vCPU, 2.75 GB memory). [Learn more](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/apply-sizing-recommendations-for-instances)
>
> **Current machine type**
> g1-small (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory)
>
> **New machine type**
> custom (1 vCPU, 2.75 GB memory) Recommended
But as we haven’t noticed any performance problems ourselves, we haven’t upgraded yet. (Just thought it would be useful to mention the hint here.) So we’ll be paying more attention to memory going forward, and I’ll update this post if we end up doing the suggested upgrade.
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