In the spectrum of Google Cloud Platform Compute products, Google App Engine is the platform as a service product. Google App Engine was Google's first Cloud Platform product. Starting in 2008, developers could write code and run it securely and scalably on people's servers. The original App Engine environment, now called App Engine Standard, only supports a limited number of programming languages. And this does not include ASP.NET Core. But now Google has created a new environment for App Engine called App Engine Flexible, which allows Dockerized applications to harness the benefits of App Engine. Simply supply a Dockerfile and a simple application configuration file, then publish the application. As a Platform as a Service product, developers using App Engine don't have to concern themselves with servers, instance templates, groups, load balancers, or health checks, or declusters. All of these are Google's responsibility. This is everything you need to take a Dockerized application and deploy it to app engine flexible. First, create an app.yaml file that describes the App Engine application. Then in the command line, use the gcloud command to deploy the application. That's it. Your application will be running on App Engine in just a couple of minutes. This demo is part three of a three part series focused on running ASP.NET Core applications on Google Cloud Platform. In the first part, we showed how straight forward it was to create ASP.NET Core web application that run on Google Compute Engine. In the second part, we made use of Visual Studio 2017 to publish an ASP.NET Core application into Google Container Engine. In this final part, we'll take the same containerized ASP.NET Core application and publish it to run in Google App Engine Flex. App Engine Flex provides a fantastic alternative to Container Engine for Google Cloud Platform customers that are happy to harness App Engine's features for running web applications. For example, on App Engine, it's easy to create multiple services and versions and run them on Google's managed service with a simple user interface in the cloud console. So let's get started. You can see that we're looking at the App Engine user interface. We've already created an App Engine environment inside our project. All we need to do now is to return to our Visual Studio environment and publish, this time selecting App Engine as our chosen target. Okay, so here I am in Visual Studio 2017. Here's the project that we created in part two of this demo. If we right click on the project and select publish to Google Cloud, then recall in the second part of this demo, we chose Container Engine as our target. For this third part, we're going to pick App Engine Flex. You'll notice that we automatically populate a version name. We can have multiple versions for our application running on a single App Engine Flex application. So it's easy to do testing or a canary release. If we click Publish, that will just take a few seconds and our application will be ready to run in Google App Engine. I'll pause the video while that happens. Okay, we're back. So we use the Google Cloud platform tools for Visual Studio to deploy our application and our application has been deployed to App Engine Flex. If we look over at the URL, here it is. You can see that the URL includes Appspot.com, which is where App Engine Flex applications are deployed to. If we add restaurants to the end of the URL, then this is our custom application functionality. So that completes part three of the demo. We've seen just how straight forward it is to make use of Visual Studio 2017, ASP.NET Core, and the Google Cloud Platform tools for Visual Studio to deploy an application to App Engine Flex on Google Cloud Platform.
