I was recently looking to scaling up an API currently hosted on Heroku.com. While adding dynos to Heroku was an option, I also thought it was a good excuse to get more familiar with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which I have been curious about for a while and have had some really good conversations on at previous events at GDG Philly.
GCP’s Cloud Endpoints seemed to be the right answer, especially since they do claim to support hybrid cloud deployments.
After setting up the Google Cloud SDK and enabling billing on my active project, I clicked on the Cloud Endpoints left nav item to get this screen…
Turns out, the Cloud Endpoints service has no user interface by default. To get started, you have to deploy your api spec (as a Swagger2 / OpenAPI document) to see anything at all. Maybe that works for folks that live and breathe the command line but I was kinda put off, specially since I was aware of how AWS API Gateway worked (we’ll look at that later)
Anyway, so clicking on “Learn more” and then a further link to the documentation takes you to this page with the following table:
So based on their documentation, it seems that the only JSON apis that Cloud Endpoints can front are those hosted on Google App Engine or Compute Engine.
Argh! (Though gRPC does look kinda interesting, just not for now)
At this point I actually debating deploying the Rails app on the App Engine. Ok, let me try out how hard that is. After all they have a blog post on how to do it.
After an hour of configuring, I was able to deploy my Rails app to Google Cloud, but it took me too much effort to connect it to the CloudSQL backend and even more to try to get migrations running (never did, and I finally gave up). Google does have a video on how to get rails migrations working using their Cloud SQL proxy but I was kinda done by then. This was taking me down a path I wasn’t really planning to go down.
Getting it work on Amazon’s API Gateway was so much easier.
The AWS console for API Gateway actually has a fairly intuitive user interface for fronting any third party api with API Gateway. At the end, you end up with a nice UI that describes the flow from the client through the gateway to your api base URL (Screenshot below)
I generally was surprised how easy AWS made their service and hopefully Google Cloud Endpoints reach the same level of simplicity. I am sure given how much Google is investing in their cloud services, this post will be out of date in a couple of months but for now AWS API Gateway does seem to have the edge
Code Zen 
Sadly it’s July 2020, and Google Cloud Endpoints is still as non-intuitive to use.
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