Aptible Deploy (formerly Aptible Enclave) is a container orchestration platform built for developers that automates security best practices and controls needed for deploying and scaling Dockerized apps in regulated industries. Aptible Deploy is ISO 27001-certified and can be used to support requirements for HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST 800-53, and other frameworks.
N/A
Google App Engine
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
I would recommend Aptible Deploy to my colleagues because of its responsiveness and efficiency for environment and application provisioning. The product is extremely useful for creating health applications due to its built-in security and compliance protocols for HIPAA and HITRUST. The automated database backups were also a nice touch for failover scenarios, as is the included horizontal scaling. The horizontal scaling automatically defaults toward high availability as well.
App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect. If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like Google Compute Engine or another managed service.
There is a slight learning curve to getting used to code on Google App Engine.
Google Cloud Datastore is Google's NoSQL database in the cloud that your applications can use. NoSQL databases, by design, cannot give handle complex queries on the data. This means that sometimes you need to think carefully about your data structures - so that you can get the results you need in your code.
Setting up billing is a little annoying. It does not seem to save billing information to your account so you can re-use the same information across different Cloud projects. Each project requires you to re-enter all your billing information (if required)
App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
Aptible makes managing HIPAA/HITRUST compliance simpler when compared to Microsoft Azure. Passing audits is technically easier when using Aptible. Aptible provides a log drain to deliver logs via Syslog or HTTPS for long-term log storage. Microsoft Azure does not have a portal specifying when controls are in place, something which Aptible does.
We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as compared to the other major players in Azure and AWS.
Less time in configuring servers. This is essentially a server-less platform.
Cost savings by using usage-based cloud
CLI can be scripted to provide full automation, even though a deployment takes about 20 minutes; that time can be even further reduced and spent elsewhere
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.
