Overview
What is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
App creation and management goodness.
Google App Engine - perfect for any app looking to modernize!
Great for small teams
Google App Engine - Easy deployment with no manageability
Its portability and scalability were the main reasons we …
Google App Engine lives up to its name!
Good Service
Google App Engine - For companies that don't have time to admin machines
A good alternative for application deployment, Google App Engine
Awesome experience on Google App Engine
Serverless Web app platform that includes auto scaling for simpler web apps
A reliable web application hosting platform
Google App Engine is a true modern wonder.
Google App Engine - simple application hosting at Google scale
A good application overall
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Scalability (31)9.090%
- Development environment creation (28)9.090%
- Platform access control (30)8.989%
- Platform management overhead (31)8.989%
Pricing
Starting Price
$0.05
Max Price
$0.30
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
MapReduce Made Easy With Google App Engine
Creating an android application with Google App Engine backend
Features
Platform-as-a-Service
Platform as a Service is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient
- 9Ease of building user interfaces(17) Ratings
Ability to build flexible user interfaces using drag-and-drop tools
- 9Scalability(31) Ratings
Ease of scaling up or down to meet demand
- 8.9Platform management overhead(31) Ratings
Resources required to keep platform up and running
- 9Workflow engine capability(23) Ratings
Process automation using rule-based engine
- 8.9Platform access control(30) Ratings
Rules controlling what data different user categories can access
- 8Services-enabled integration(27) Ratings
Ability to integrate with cloud applications and data via APIs and pre-built connectors
- 9Development environment creation(28) Ratings
Ease of creating new development environments
- 8Development environment replication(27) Ratings
Ease of replicating new development environments
- 9Issue monitoring and notification(27) Ratings
Integrated monitoring and notification of issues and problems
- 8.9Issue recovery(25) Ratings
Ease of recovery from problem state
- 8Upgrades and platform fixes(28) Ratings
Ease of deployment of major upgrades or problem fixes
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
Key Features
Popular Languages
Build applications in Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, or PHP—or bring a
custom language runtime
Open & Flexible
Custom runtimes allows developers to bring any library and framework to App
Engine by supplying a Docker container
Fully Managed
A fully managed environment lets developers focus on code while App Engine
manages infrastructure concerns
Monitoring, Logging & Diagnostics
Google Stackdriver provides application diagnostics to debug and monitor the
health and performance of apps
Application Versioning
Host different versions of applications, create development, test, staging, and
production environments
Traffic Splitting
Route incoming requests to different app versions, A/B test, and do incremental
feature rollouts
Application Security
Help safeguard applications by defining access rules with App Engine firewall
and leverage managed SSL/TLS certificates* by default on a custom domain at no
additional cost
Services Ecosystem
Tap a growing ecosystem of GCP services from applications including a suite of
cloud developer tools
Google App Engine Integrations
Google App Engine Competitors
Google App Engine Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(231)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)App Engine Review!
- Removes the need for manual server configuration, management, orchestration, etc
- Interfaces incredibly well with other GCP services, like Cloud Functions and Firebase
- It is not the most cost-efficient hosting provider and could continue to improve from a cost basis
- Google's UI can be confusing for newcomers when managing an App Engine deployment
- Scalability
- 100%10.0
- Platform management overhead
- 80%8.0
- Platform access control
- 100%10.0
- Services-enabled integration
- 100%10.0
- Development environment creation
- 100%10.0
- Development environment replication
- 100%10.0
- Issue monitoring and notification
- 100%10.0
- Issue recovery
- 90%9.0
- Upgrades and platform fixes
- 100%10.0
- App Engine is a great starting point for customers who are already invested or want to become further invested in the Google Cloud Platform environment
- App Engine removes the need for manual server management, which saves a lot of developer time and money
- Web Infrastructure Hosting
- Automated Scaling for Infrastructure Management
- Rapid Prototyping and Deployment
- Continuous Delivery with Automated Versioning and Rollbacks
- Easily capable of hosting more backend worker-like tasks, not just web-facing applications
- Rapid prototyping of new types of applications
- We'd like to take advantage of some of the other platforms that App Engine supports, having been mainly focused on Python development
- We'd like to see better support for Java EE and Spring, as some of the functionality that we like to implement often involves complicated workarounds to deal with how App Engine generally behaves
Expensive, Cutting Edge and Highly Recommended
- Quick to develop, quick to deploy. You can be up and running on Google App Engine in no time.
- Flexible. We use Java for some services and Node.js for others.
- Great security features. We have been consistently impressed with the security and authentication features of Google App Engine.
- Documentation does not always keep up with the latest changes to the service. Google App Engine has undergone a lot of changes these past couple of years. At times, we were surprised to find out that something we didn't think was possible was, or, conversely, something that was supposed to work fine which had been deprecated. We also ended up using some undocumented features and weren't sure whether they would keep working or not.
- Price. Google App Engine isn't cheap. But, you get what you pay for. Rock solid service, great tools, at a hefty price.
- Difficult to tell how to optimize costs. We racked up the expenses and it is still a mystery where all the costs are being incurred.
- Some intimidating or arcane aspects of configuration. Most of it was a breeze but every now and then something would be pretty far out and require a few of us developers putting our heads together to figure it out.
- Sometimes required reading source code to figure out how to do something. Not a ton of examples of how to do various things, nor Stack Overflow posts, at least in the beginning. I imagine this will change as the community grows. But sometimes it felt like we were all alone trying to figure out how to do things.
- Ease of building user interfaces
- N/AN/A
- Scalability
- 100%10.0
- Platform management overhead
- 80%8.0
- Workflow engine capability
- N/AN/A
- Platform access control
- 100%10.0
- Services-enabled integration
- 100%10.0
- Development environment creation
- N/AN/A
- Development environment replication
- N/AN/A
- Issue monitoring and notification
- N/AN/A
- Issue recovery
- N/AN/A
- Upgrades and platform fixes
- 100%10.0
- Positive impact: Google App Engine let us rapidly build and deploy web services which support an array of applications across mobile and web platforms. We have found the services to be highly reliable and have been overall very satisfied with the level of stability, security and functionality we've achieved.
- Negative impact: We are dissatisfied with the seemingly-unnecessary level of complexity in some areas which has made code hand-off difficult. It has taken developers many months to learn the ins and outs of Google App Engine and understand the complex infrastructure of our services and so when someone has never worked on these services before, there can be a sizable ramp up time. So while it was very quick to build, it is not always obvious or apparent how to make modifications or how everything works together. There is a bit of "magic" involved where you have to really understand the system to see why, counter-intuitively, certain things happen the way they do.
- Positive impact: We've had the flexibility to implement certain features which we thought would be unsupported or too difficult to achieve with Google App Engine. So it has allowed us to do some very cool things that we were surprised were possible.
- Negative impact: It's very expensive, and combined with the extra time spent in development trying to figure out some of the more arcane aspects of Google App Engine, it is hard to know whether we could have saved money by choosing a different platform provider, but it seems likely.
- Authenticated, secure file storage and distribution
- Rapid deployment of web services
- Computational power for batch file conversion
- We were able to use the Google App Engine file storage to perform many security functions without having to add new features on another layer.
- We hope to continue using Google App Engine for future web services and computational workload tasks.
Google App Engine's best feature is cloud endpoint
We are currently evaluating Google App engine as a platform as a service to our customers. The Google App Engine cloud endpoints is equivalent to Microsoft Azure's web apps or API apps. We are impressed with its ability to deploy Java or Python based RestFul API directly to Cloud endpoints. I coded the logic in the RestFul API to access Google's Cloud DataStore (kind-entity-property type of data store). Google's SDK made it easy to integrate its App Engine with its storage solutions. I have not tried its Cloud Bigtable from Cloud endpoints but I'm sure it's on our next task list.
Google App Engine's primary programming language is Java. I tried JetBrain's IntelliJ IDEA for managing Google App engine cloud endpoint projects. I used the community edition, which had less support for Google App Engine Cloud endpoint. The enterprise edition should have better support.
For those who prefer to use Python, JetBrains may have just released PyCharm for $99. Nothing comes for free. If you work at a company that has those licenses, you should feel lucky. Having a good IDE is critical to productivity. It has a "PyCharm Free Educational (Classroom) License" for free.
- Auto scale application load.
- Platform as a Service feature abstracts the web server layer.
- Perfect for Android or iOS app server logic development.
- Connect to different Google storage types.
- Able to use C# as the programming language in its SDK.
- Integration with Visual studio C# for using Google app engine cloud endpoint SDK.
- Documentation on choosing a IDE to get started. Doing things in the command line is too basic. It's good to know them but having a sophisticated IDE is the next step to achieve higher productivity.
- What kind of data store do you plan to use for your server side application? Make sure Google App Engine SDK supports them.
- Will your server applications be REST based? Think about using cloud endpoint.
- Do you plan to use a JSP page with servlet class?
- Ease of building user interfaces
- 10%1.0
- Scalability
- 100%10.0
- Platform management overhead
- 100%10.0
- Workflow engine capability
- 100%10.0
- Platform access control
- 100%10.0
- Services-enabled integration
- 100%10.0
- Development environment creation
- 100%10.0
- Development environment replication
- 100%10.0
- Issue monitoring and notification
- 100%10.0
- Issue recovery
- 100%10.0
- Upgrades and platform fixes
- 100%10.0
- Positive: Customers with Java, Python code base may choose to use Google app engine over Microsoft Azure for deploying their web applications.
- Negative: Customers with C# ASP.NET web application code base may choose not to use Google app engine due to lack of C# support in the SDK.
- Positive: pricing is 10% more competitive compared to Microsoft Azure and %48 more competitive compared to Amazon AWS.
- Windows Azure
Consider the data store your web applications will need. If it's a brand new v1 application, look at the storage offerings from Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Google. It's quite difficult to connect to Amazon's or Microsoft Azure's storage from web applications running in Google App Engine.
- serving micro-services based REST APIs
- corporate inventory management Web applications
- store based web applications
- payment processing REST APIs
- Product catalog REST APIs
- Order management REST APIs
- Store Location management REST APIs
- Language runtime specific knowledge and skills
- For App Engine flexible, skills and knowledge of Docker containers
- StackDriver monitoring for configuring real time alerts to the DevOps team.
- Trackdriver trace to troubleshoot service level latency.
- Stackdriver Debug and error reporting to find production bugs.
- Stackdriver profiler to get application performance insights.
- Stackdriver logging to troubleshoot general application errors and warnings.
- Google Cloud certified professional cloud developer.
- DevOps team. Ops team are lesser qualified because troubleshooting App Engine errors will require most developer's skills.
- building new Microservices
- building new REST APIs
- rebuilding or migrating existing microservices to App Engine
- rebuilding or rehosting containerized web apps to App Engine flexible.
- Migrate low security risk REST API to App Engine
- configure Serverless VPC Access for App Engine standard services to consume Cloud SQL or Compute engine hosted microservices or databases.
- Use App Engine firewall to restrict traffic into the deployed services.
- Migrate existing Java 8 App Engine standard services to Java 11 with Google Cloud SDK.
- Build greenfield Java 11 REST APIs with App Engine standard Java 11 runtime.
There are currently a growing demand for running custom web serving frameworks with the latest Java runtime in top cloud providers. Google Cloud App Engine Java 11 runtime is meant to solve exactly that problem. It's the next degree of serverless offering from Google Cloud Run. While Cloud Run offers building and deploying any Docker image to Google managed kubernetes hidden from developers, App Engine standard Java 11 runtime does a similar job except it's meant for Java 11 runtime. Enterprises may be more interested in deploying existing containerized applications to Google Cloud Run on GKE compared to Cloud Run and App Engine. Cloud Run on GKE allows the network and security teams to prepare a GKE cluster that complies with the corporate security and network requirements, which can't be done in App Engine Java 11 runtime.
The advancement from Java 8 to Java 11 runtime isn't trivial. Developers can bring their own web serving frameworks and customize the Java entry point in app.yaml:
entrypoint: java Main.java
You can find all the App Engine samples for Java 11 on github. I tried the sprint boot sample and added a REST endpoint:
Good App Engine (GAE)
- The APIs for accessing the datastore are very easy to use.
- Implementing text indexing and search related applications perform better on Google App Engine compared to other app engines.
- Reliable NoSQL datastore, including atomic transactions and a query engine.
- Developers have read-only access to the filesystem on Google App Engine.
- Google App Engine limits the maximum rows returned from an entity get to 1000 rows per Datastore call.
- Not suitable for CPU intensive calculations.
- Ease of building user interfaces
- 60%6.0
- Scalability
- 80%8.0
- Platform management overhead
- 60%6.0
- Workflow engine capability
- 70%7.0
- Platform access control
- 90%9.0
- Services-enabled integration
- 70%7.0
- Development environment creation
- 70%7.0
- Development environment replication
- 60%6.0
- Issue monitoring and notification
- 80%8.0
- Issue recovery
- 70%7.0
- Upgrades and platform fixes
- 90%9.0
- Increased employee efficiency.
- Less infrastructure maintenance time.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Data analysis
- web app deployment
- app deployment through ansible
- docker installation
- data algorrithm processing. data intensive operation
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Analyst Reports
- Don't know
- pricing
- deployment
- scalability
- ease of use
- multi platform support
- memory intensive operations
- Cloud based RESTful APIs
- Access to big data resources for reporting and analytics
- Custom Cloud web hosted applications
- Cost, speed, ease of adoption
- Implemented a custom company based web site using Vosao on GAE CMS
- Administration and management - more Azure like portal
- Better reporting on forecasted and actual usage via notifications.
- Better documentation, examples. More use case centric documentation.
- Learning curve is relatively short.
- Integration to Eclipse is awesome.
- Integration with standard frameworks is getting better - I would not recommend loading entire spring framework on it, but aspects of it are more useful.
- Effective employee adoption through ease of use.
- Effective integration to other java based frameworks.
- Time to market is very quick. Build, test, deploy and use.
- The GAE Whitelist for java is an important resource to know what works and what does not. So use it. It would also be nice for Google to expand on items that are allowed on GAE platform.
- Amazon Web Services,Microsoft Azure
- These products really only intersect with a small footprint.
- Azure is closest to what GAE provides as a PaaS
- Azure is certainly making greater 'in-roads' on the enterprise cloud adoption side of the business. Google has still work to do to come close to Microsoft's ability to adapt for the enterprise
- Now that GAE supports PHP, Python, Java and Go - it needs to expand its language use, such as C#, Ruby and others if it is to stay competitive in the market
- Readily available
- Ease of use
- Cost effectiveness
- Known entity (i.e. I've used it before)
- Good access to Google other APIs from GAE.
- Needs a good understanding of cloud based management
- Understands GAE and some aspects of tuning for use case used.
- Understands how to improvise a design for better GAE usage
- Published cloud APIs
- Published low maintenance web applications
- Demonstration of how easy cloud based development can be
- Demonstrates integration to other Google products and services
- Photo sharing
- Live sports stats collection, collation and reporting
- API usage
- Verification and validation services
- APIs
- Security frameworks
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation