title: Cloud Tasks with an automatically scaling App Engine that last longer than 10 minutes
body: <p>I have a backend for an iOS app that I've built on App Engine and I'm looking to do potentially long running background tasks to add records to my Cloud SQL database. Is this possible without Compute Engine? I've seen Cloud Tasks can do asynchronous work and you can set the dispatchDeadline to basically anything you want, but I've also read in the documentation</p>
  <p><em>For App Engine tasks, 0 indicates that the request has the default deadline. The default deadline depends on the scaling type of the service: 10 minutes for standard apps with automatic scaling, 24 hours for standard apps with manual and basic scaling, and 60 minutes for flex apps. If the request deadline is set, it must be in the interval [15 seconds, 24 hours 15 seconds]. Regardless of the task's dispatchDeadline, the app handler will not run for longer than than the service's timeout. <strong>We recommend setting the dispatchDeadline to at most a few seconds more than the app handler's timeout</strong>. For more information see Timeouts.</em></p>
  <p>I don't particularly need the App Engine instance to care if the task completes or not... so I'm not sure why the recommendation is <strong>at most a few seconds more than the app handler's timeout</strong> ... can anyone shed any light on this? What am I missing? Adding a Compute Engine for these relatively simple tasks that will take at most a few ours to complete seems like a lot of overhead and I don't want this to dictate which scaling options I choose.</p>
  <p>Thanks for your time.</p>