After setting out to try to build a simple and cheap static blog in the google cloud platform, I’ve come to the conclusion after trying to work through all the different services and tools offered, that google cloud platform isn’t a good fit for this kind of site. And that is okay.
It was a fun experiment to see what I could get going and how cheap I could get it. I was initially thinking of running a simple GKE cluster and run the site on top of that, but then with the complexities of running multiple global load balancers and certificates to make sure I support ip v4 and v6 as well as supporting redirects from www.winsnes.io to winsnes.io both for http and https. It did start getting fairly complicated, and costly, as the redirection rules do add up.
The more I looked at the difficulties I had with getting everything to play nicely, and then comparing it to services like Netlify, which solves it all for you, and for this simple use case is free of charge. It gets hard to justify running this on google.
If I was building an app requiring a dynamic backend and data store, I would use GCP in the future, just not for this kind of simple static site.
Thanks for reading, I’ll keep writing in the future, just not about this specific topic.