You can opt-out of the automatic system updates and restarts by placing your single instance in debugging mode <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/java/debugging-an-instance>. Just note that if you choose to take it out of debugging mode that the instance will be turned down and a new instance will take its place at that time.
For clarity, the recommended solution of increasing instances comes directly from the documented strategies <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/java/how-instances-are-managed#instance_uptime>to prevent application downtime due to instance restarts (and will aid in avoiding the 'failed_to_pick_backend' issue as it provides more instances for the load balancer to route to). The 'failed_to_pick_backend' issue is high priority and has already turned up partial fixes that have already been deployed. Since there are many causes for this issue and it isn't caused by any single point of failure, the engineering team are performing a deep dive to root out any and all fixes. In the meantime it is recommended to follow the best practices to ensure your application has instances up and running while our monitoring systems and health checks are configured to better handle dropped instance (which cause the load balancer 'failed_to_pick_backend' errors). - Note I will also copy this reply to the issue report <https://issuetracker.google.com/71840041> for completeness, as all further communications should continue there. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/c00a6001-a12f-4eec-882e-4853c021c6e6%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
