After watching Google's recent IO 2013 session on "Run your PHP on Google's Cloud",
Which shows how we can run Wordpress and Drupal on their App Engine, I am wondering what it would take for us to run Moodle on the App Engine too.
Any ideas?
In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Matteo Scaramuccia -
Hi Nadav,
it could be a nice opportunity for some Customers - read: those ones with no constraints about where their own data will be hosted and which data return policy will be applied to their own data.
It will require some tweaks to add "Google Frontend" among the supported Web Servers and to configure the required MySQL database parameters, here driven by the Cloud SQL connection string.
Wondering about MUC and the built-in Memcache (22:07) service too: GAE doesn't require an explicit connection to the daemon so it will require a (simple) extension of the current stores, e.g. cachestore_gaememcache and cachestore_gaememcached.
Task Queues could be interesting too but legacy, closed to GAE.
One issue among the potential ones is that add-ons installation&update must be done (re-)pushing files into GAE via their SDK - kind of the "old" FTP way - invalidating the works done in 2.4 and 2.5. Probably, everything could be solved by implementing a new storage plugin for the Moodle storage subsystem using the Google Storage, fixing some missing points for the most used add-on modules (e.g. Certificate). Besides Moodle dataroot should be reviewed to run under the abstraction of the Files API too.
HTH,
Matteo
In reply to Matteo Scaramuccia
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Nadav Kavalerchik -
Hi Matteo,
Thank you for your enlightening "points to consider" and all the detailed response and suggestions.
I see if I have some spare time on my hands to play around with a Moodle instance on the new Google PHP App Engine.
Thanks
Nadav
if I want to add database to Moodle from GAE, can you tell me some methods to do,please?
Hey, Andrew here - I work on Google App Engine, on the PHP team.
We'd love to see how well Moodle works on App Engine - several people asked us about this at Google I/O last week, so it's definately interesting to people. If anybody is trying please let us know (you can contact me through this forum) and we'll do what we can to help.
On memcache - since it's not necessary - PHP on GAE actually just ignores any implicit connection, so most code that uses Memcache or Memcached should work out of the box.
Beautiful! Thanks
In reply to Andrew Jessup
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
Hi Andrew,
I'm highly interested on running moodle on GAE.
Could we sync contacts to start a conversation?
You can reach me at acpgomes at gmail dot com, or give me your email so I can make contact.
Thank you in advance.
Best regards.
Antonio Gomes.
In reply to Antonio Carlos Pereira Gomes
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Anthony Galvin -
Just wondering if anyone has managed to drop a Moodle instance into the App Engine PHP beta - would be great to hear if anyone has any war stories that they would like to share.
Thanks,
Anthony
I just got white-listed to do just that so I may give it a shot this weekend or may have to wait for Monday with more bandwidth.
Hi,
Just wondering if anyone was successful in deploying Moodle to GAE. I'm also interested in including Moodle into a GAE solution.
Thanks!
Marcio.
Has anyone made progress on this? Not wishing to be pushy, but Andrew's offer was six months ago... or should I infer from the silence that things didn't go well? ... would very much like to see a 2.x on GAE.
many thanks, greg
I'd like to see if someone started a wiki for this or can we start a page here at m.org about the subject.
I've got it running locally, but my instance consists of over 10k files. Any thoughts, Andrew?
Hi Andrew
I'm interested in running Moodle in Google Cloud.can I schedule a time to discuss this with you? I'm an experienced Moodle administrator.
Regards,
David
Hey David,
Happy to connect. You can reach me via:
google.com/+AndrewJessup
or
www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjessup/
Cheers, AJ
In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Nadav Kavalerchik -
I was busy enough for a while not having time and a free mind to go forward with this project,
luck me!
Now, that I am back on the issue...
It seems there is a new and different solution to the Moodle on the Cloud dream: Moodle on Openshift
In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Nadav Kavalerchik -
Now we can 
Thanks to Bitnami's engineers, now, we can run latest Moodle 2.8.x on Google cloud in one click!
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Just found on Forbes about Google Cloud, http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/02/04/cloudways-adds-google-compute-engine-to-its-application-hosting-platform/
Now Moodle can easily deploy with Google Compute Engine from Cloudways here: Moodle on Google Cloud
In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Ronoaldo Pereira -
Any updates on running Moodle o App Engine, instead of Compute Engine? My point is that, App Engine scales very well, and if there is a way to map the MUC on the App Engine sandbox via Cloud Storage, that would be awesome.
I did some attempts to make it work, but sadly, some operations over Cloud Storage that MCU performs, like file locking, seem to be unavailable on the "gcs://" stream handler, and as such. If anyone want's to try it out, I can help with testing as well, but I would love someone that is a Moodle developer to help me guide where changes should/could be made.
Best!
In reply to Ronoaldo Pereira
Re: Running Moodle on Google's new PHP App Engine
by Nadav Kavalerchik -
Did you try openshift cloud?
Maybe their storage engine can support file locking. I think they use the OpenStack infrastructure.
Another option to throw into the mix is Cloudways who offer Moodle stacks ready to go on Amazon, Google, and DigitalOcean (DO). DO's prices look much more favourable to me: http://www.cloudways.com/en/pricing.php