How to deploy your web app to Google Cloud and Render for free

Apr 30, 2023

How to deploy and host a dynamic web application (Node.js, Java, Ruby, Python, Go) on the cloud for free with a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider such as Google App Engine and Render

Contents

Introduction

Whether working alone or with a team, developers often need to host their web apps on the cloud for learning, experimenting and development purposes or when running services sporadically and occasionally.

Many cloud platforms offer a free starter plan to deploy these kinds of apps.

The platforms that offer the most features with excellent developer experience include Google App Engine (part of the Google Cloud Platform aka GCP) and Render.

Google App Engine: extra cloud features

If you want to deploy highly scalable applications on a fully managed serverless platform, Google App Engine is the right choice.

Out of the box supported languages include: Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby and Go.

In addition to hosting your application, you get the following features for free:

5 GB Months regional storage with Cloud Storage
1 GB Firestore storage
10 GB Pub/Sub messages per month
2 million Cloud Functions invocations per month
50 GB of logs with 30 day retention with Stackdriver
2 million Cloud Run requests per month
1 Compute Engine F1-micro instance per month

Free plan quotas and limitations

Up to 256 MB of memory for Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby and Go
28 free hours per day: shared by all your apps, enough for 1 app (see Tips for more info)
1 GB app size (Code & Static Data Storage)
No single static data file can be larger than 32MB. The limit for Go is 64MB
Outgoing bandwidth: 1 GB / day
Each incoming HTTP request can be no larger than 32MB

Getting started

You don't need to activate the trial to create an app engine project:

Navigate to the App Engine dashboard and login to your google account
Create a new project
Create a new application
Select a region (Available regions & zones)
Select your programming language and keep the standard environment selected (the other option is not free)

Your Google App Engine application is now created.

Follow the quickstart guide relative to your programming language to prepare your web app and necessary config files

You can deploy using a plugin for your project's build tool when available. You can also deploy your app by executing gcloud app deploy from the Google Cloud SDK Shell within your app's root directory (may require to add a billing method)

After deploying the app, you can view the quota limits from the Quotas page

Tips

When you deploy your app to Google App Engine, it's automatically associated to one of the following instance types:
- Frontend Instance: 28 free F1 instance-hours per day
- Backend Instance: 9 free B1 instance-hours per day
By default, your app is assumed to be a Frontend Instance with automatic scaling. But if you change the app.yaml in your root directory, and introduce a configuration to enable the Basic or Manual scaling, your app will become assumed to be a Backend Instance. To ensure that your app usage will always be free, you can define the following properties in your app.yaml file
```
---
instance_class: F1
automatic_scaling:
  max_instances: 1
```
Add the --quiet flag to your gcloud command to disable all interactive prompts
When deploying using a gcloud command, specify explicitly your app's version to avoid having multiple instances being billed thus reducing your daily free hours allowance. A glcoud deploy command example would be: gcloud --quiet app deploy --version=production

References

Render: the ultimate Heroku alternative

Render is a fully-managed platform that gives you the simplest path to delivering apps quickly, seamless continuous integration and a great Heroku alternative.

You can deploy all your web apps, static sites, APIs / Web Services, scheduled / cron jobs, PostgreSQL database and Redis cache in one place using git as your code repository and deploy trigger.

Supported technologies include:

Node.js
Python
Go
Ruby
Rust
Elixir
Docker to deploy web apps in any language
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) if you have many services

Free plan quotas and limitations

256 MB RAM
1 GB SSD storage
97 connections
10 GB of egress (outgoing) bandwidth per month
750 hours of running time per month
The app sleeps after 15 minutes of inactivity

Other limitations include 500 minutes of free builds and limited scaling.

Getting started

Navigate to the dashboard homepage and sign up
Create a new web service
Link your git repository (Github or Gitlab are supported)

You can choose the free plan and configure your web app deployment in the next page.

You can also deploy either manually or automatically when pushing to your git repository.

References

Soufiane Sakhi is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and a professional full stack developer based in Paris, France. He is the creator of Simply-how.com, the My Route Directions Android app, and many open source browser extensions such as YouTube Playlist Helper and Feedly filtering and sorting.