Hi Tim,
Thank you for your insightful questions! My responses are below:
*> Is this the cheapest zone/region for computation or bandwidth? If I am not in the US, would it be faster or cheaper for me to use a local google data center?*
Yes, it would be faster for you to use a local google data center https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/locations. I have added a variable "REGION" in the script of the uploader. You can now change the region by replacing "us-central" with another region. I have also added an explanation of how to do this in the README. Below is a list of all the regions:
REGION SUPPORTS STANDARD SUPPORTS FLEXIBLE asia-northeast1 YES YES europe-west YES NO us-central YES YES us-east1 YES YES
You can also obtain this list via the following terminal command https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/app/regions/list(with GAEuploader as your current directory): ./google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud app regions list
As you pointed out, I have set the zone to zone3 in my original code. However, it turned out that zone is relevant only when working with Google Compute Engine https://cloud.google.com/compute/, which is not the case for GAEuploader. So I have removed the line "subprocess.check_call([" ./google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud", "beta", "config", "set", "compute/zone", " zone3"])
*> Which tor bridge does the traffic for these instances go through? (Or does this set up a tor bridge as well?)* The bridge uses https://meek.bamsoftware.com/, which is on the same host as the meek-azure bridge, but not rate-limited like meek-azure is. You can find more information on Tor relays at its Atlas page: https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/C20658946DD706A7A2181159A1A04C D838570D04 If you want to use a different bridge, you can edit the file appengine/reflect.go before running uploader: forwardURL = "https://meek.bamsoftware.com/"
Thanks again for your input! Please let me know if you have any more questions/feedback.
Best, Katherine Li