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Ask HN: Static Sites on Google Cloud

9 points by kaishiro ↗ HN
Been playing with Google Cloud Functions the past couple of months and am feeling really good about the direction it's heading (an alternative to Lambda has always felt like the missing piece of GC to me).

That being said, I host a suite of static sites in S3 buckets sitting behind Cloudfront at the moment, and it's largely a painless process getting them up and running w/ SSL. I'd love to build the next few on GC but as far as I can tell it's a bit of legwork getting static sites hosted w/ SSL on Google Cloud Storage - you need to setup Cloud Load Balancing and a Cloud CDN instance to get the full chain.

Maybe I'm being lazy (a definite possibility), but this seems fairly complex comparatively. Does anyone have experience hosting production static sites on GC? Is the above still the solution here or am I missing something?

4 comments

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Elect2
You must set a load balancer to use Google Cloud CDN.

But I'd recommend to use Google Cloud Storage + Cloudfront. Since you are hosting static pages that can be cached by Cloudfront, there are almost no costs on the data traffic from Google Storage to Cloudfront. Cloudfront is easier to use and you can control more.

kaishiro
Thanks for the response. I expected this would be the case. Appreciate it.
BrandonY
If you need to host static content over HTTPS with a custom domain, then yes, Cloud Load Balancing is the main option at the moment. You can use GCS for HTTP serving from a custom domain or via HTTPS from GCS's own domain (https://yourbucket.storage.googleapis.com), but for serving HTTPS content from a custom domain, that requires configuring Cloud Load Balancer.

(I work on Google Cloud Storage)