Google Cloud#

Google Cloud is not a supported deployment target. The application is deployed with Docker on an EC2 instance — see Deploying on AWS.

The project ran on Cloud Run for a while, against Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, with research files in a GCS bucket and secrets in Secret Manager. That deployment is retired: no Cloud Run service is kept warm, no Cloud SQL instance is running, and none of the documentation elsewhere in this guide assumes Google Cloud.

What is left of it:

  • backend/app/scripts/gcloud/ holds the Google-specific script helpers — service and Cloud SQL defaults, gcloud executable discovery, the Cloud Run YAML escaping. Nothing outside that package imports from it, so it can be deleted in one step if Cloud Run is ruled out for good.

  • The generic script helpers those files used to share — path discovery, .env parsing, subprocess handling — now live in backend/app/scripts/script_utils.py and are used by the ordinary prestart and client-generation scripts.

Cloud Run may come back as a second target later: it suits this application, which is a stateless read-mostly API in front of a Postgres database, and the container images built for Docker would run there unchanged. The blockers are the database and the import, not the web tier — Cloud SQL storage for a 10 GB database plus a bucket of research files costs more than the single EC2 instance that currently carries both, and the importer wants a long-running task rather than a request-scoped one. Reviving it means restoring the provisioning and deploy scripts into backend/app/scripts/gcloud/, not rewriting the application.