Today I’m going to talk about the current issues I’m encountering with Google Cloud. I’m in the process of standing up our production environment for the CS467 Capstone Project (an issue tracker like Jira). There have been (and continue to be) many speed bumps along the way, however I am learning a lot.

In previous classes where we used databases (i.e., CS290 – Web Dev, and CS340 Intro to Databases), standing up and connecting to databases was pretty straightforward. You create the database, provide your credentials, and establish a connection. So, I thought the process would be simple and similar with the Google Cloud PostgreSQL database that we are using for our CS467 project. However, this has not been the case.

I am currently able to connect to the cloud database using my local client by providing the database credential and IP whitelisting. However, when I run the client on Google App Engine (GAE) and try to make calls to the database I am unsuccessful. After a few hours of tinkering and research, I found that I need to establish a connection using a Unix socket, since GAE uses a dynamic IP address. This is unlike anything that I have encountered in previous classes. Fortunately, Google provides a tutorial for how to do this, though it is quite dense (at least for me).

I plan to go through the “Google App Engine connection to PostgreSQL tutorial” over the next few days. Hopefully I will be successful, and the connection will work.

I will say that with struggling through all of this configuration, I am learning a tremendous amount about cloud environments. And, I’m sure this knowledge will be useful later on in my career.