Set-up a Dynamic Website using Cloud Storage/Compute Engine/Cloud Run/Firebase
It’s amazing how much information there is on the web. A few months ago, when I was contemplating returning to the blogosphere, I made a list of topics that I thought might be interesting to folks as a way of learning about various Google Cloud Platform technologies. My hope was that everyone could try these things from the free tier so I started my search for all the info I would need to make it happen.
Whoops.
After a few weeks of on-and-off research I came across the Google Developers site which has all sorts of How To’s/Codelabs…including how to deploy websites using:
- Cloud Storage Buckets
- Compute Engine
- Cloud Run
- Firebase (okay, so this isn’t a tutorial, but there are quite a few available and you can play with a demo project)
I like to think of these as supporting one of two implementations:
- Static sites
- Dynamic sites
Static sites by definition have only static assets:
- web pages with or without client-side Javascript
- images
- videos
- anything else you can access through a URL
Dynamic sites are more interesting because they encompass static sites as well as the notion of creating web pages and other resources on the fly (the dynamic part; think of WordPress).
So: static sites have all of their assets created ahead of time and ready to go (think Jekyll, Hugo, Gridsome, Eleventy, Pelican, Zola…OMG, so many). Dynamic sites can support both static assets and dynamic assets.
Try out one or more of the above links to try out different ways to create a static site and, depending on how complex the static site is, you might get away with a website that costs you nothing but time.*
References
Top 5 Static Site Generators in 2023 (and When to Use Them)
Host a Static Website in Google Cloud with Cloud Storage
Host and scale a web app in Google Cloud with Compute Engine
Create a web frontend using App Engine
Deploy a website with Cloud Run
*I will admit that I did a lot of research on free web hosting as well and found that probably the easiest free web hosting is…GitLab. Put your static files into a GitLab repo and they give you free website hosting and a free SSL certificate.