Google App Engine... ready for prime time?

Google recently announced the availability of google cloud and google app engine in Australia. Since that's where my users are located I decided to migrate my Google App Engine application to the Australian availability zone.

Google don't make it particularly easy to do this, there is no button in the console to move your application, you must do the following manual steps:

1. create a new application
2. upload the code to the new application
3. disable datastore writes on your existing application
4. grant permissions to the bucket used to store your datastore backups so the new application can read them
5. backup the data store of the existing application
6. then restore the backups to the new application 
7. then create a mapping of your custom domain to the new application

at this point, I tested my new application and I could see that google was serving the new application, so it looked like everything was working and I went to bed.

The next morning, my application was no longer working. It was configured to accept secure connections only, and when I remapped the custom domain, app engine decided to delete my certificate without telling me.

Well, that's not so bad, all I need to do is upload the ssl certificate to my new application, right?

Trouble is, app engine won't let me. Every time I try, it fails with an extremely unhelpful error message.

This seems to me to be some unexpected error in the backend, which is no surprise as the whole App Engine infrastructure is a little half baked. Turns out I had uploaded the wrong private key file, which I figured out by using a certificate checker site.

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