AWS Lambda vs. Google App Engine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS Lambda
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, users can run code for virtually any type of app or backend service—all with zero administration. It takes of requirements to run and scale code with high availability.
$NaN
Per 1 ms
Google App Engine
Score 8.5 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.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Pricing
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Editions & Modules
128 MB
$0.0000000021
Per 1 ms
1024 MB
$0.0000000167
Per 1 ms
10240 MB
$0.0000001667
Per 1 ms
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Considered Both Products
AWS Lambda
Chose AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is good for short running functions, and ideally in response to events within AWS. Google App Engine is a more robust environment which can have complex code running for long periods of time, and across more than one instance of hardware. Google App Engine allows for …
Chose AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is the comparison tool to App Engine. I selected Lambda because the entire stack is basically on Amazon Web Services.
Google App Engine
Chose Google App Engine
For our organization, we selected Google App Engine which provides a reliable and efficient way to create and deploy apps moreover it supports a lot of languages and provides automatic debugging of code which enables us to deploy code to production as soon as development is …
Chose Google App Engine
If you have a small team which is also responsible for development of the product then surely go for it. And if you have a larger team with dedicated person to take care of deployments. Go for cheaper options such as compute engine or AWS (be sure to do your research on pricing …
Chose Google App Engine
You can create and scale Kubernetes clusters quickly, but you have to keep an eye on that cluster. In-App Engine, you don't have to worry about infrastructure, but in some scenarios, Kubernetes fits better.
Chose Google App Engine
Azure App Service is in par with Google App Engine although you may want to use Azure App Service if you are integrating with other Microsoft IT components, for example SQL Server. Google App Engine is great when in long run, you will be using Google cloud components, for …
Chose Google App Engine
The two giants are Google and Amazon. Both are very similar however Google App Engine allows you to deploy your web applications through platforms like Python where as if you're using AWS, you have full control on the operating system services. Google is good because you pay as …
Chose Google App Engine
I think that Microsoft and Amazon are simply investing more in their offerings, and there are a bunch of cool PaaS solutions out there as well. Google App Engine is solid, and is probably the right choice for some projects. But ultimately one should evaluate each platform …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
AWS Lambda
9.3
3 Ratings
3% below category average
Google App Engine
-
Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
AWS Lambda
6.1
3 Ratings
4% below category average
Google App Engine
-
Ratings
Dashboards6.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Standard reports6.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Custom reports5.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Function as a Service (FaaS)
Comparison of Function as a Service (FaaS) features of Product A and Product B
AWS Lambda
7.9
3 Ratings
3% below category average
Google App Engine
-
Ratings
Programming Language Diversity9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Runtime API Authoring8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Function/Database Integration8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
DevOps Stack Integration6.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
AWS Lambda
-
Ratings
Google App Engine
8.7
31 Ratings
8% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings9.017 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.031 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings9.031 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings9.023 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings9.030 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.027 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings9.028 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.027 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings9.027 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings8.925 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.028 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Small Businesses
IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 8.1 out of 10
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(48 ratings)
8.0
(35 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(8 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(13 ratings)
7.7
(7 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(20 ratings)
8.4
(12 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS LambdaGoogle App Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Scenarios where AWS Lambda is well suited: 1. When we need to run a periodic task few times in a day or every hour, we may deploy it on AWS Lambda so it would not increase load on our server which is handling client requests and at the same time we don't have to pay for AWS Lambda when it is not running. So, overall we only pay for few function invocations. 2. When some compute intensive processing is to be done but the number of requests per unit of time fluctuates. For example, we had deployed an AWS Lambda for processing images into different sizes and storing them on AWS S3 once user uploads them. Now, this is something that may happen few times every hour on a particular day or may not happen even once on other days. To handle this kind of tasks AWS Lambda is a better choice as we don't have to pay for the idle time of the server and also we don't have to worry about scaling when the load is high. Scenarios where AWS Lambda is not appropriate to use: 1. When we expect a large request volume continuously on the server. 2. When we don't want latency even in case of concurrent requests.
Read full review
Google
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.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Lambda provides multiple methods for triggering functions, this includes AWS resources and services and external triggers like APIs and CLI calls.
  • The compute provided my Lambda is largely hands off for operations teams. Once the function is deployed, the management overhead is minimal since there are no servers to maintain.
  • Lambda's pricing can be very cost effective given that users are only charged for the time the function runs and associated costs like network or storage if those are used. A function that executes quickly and is not called often can cost next to nothing.
Read full review
Google
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Putting a significant portion of your codebase into AWS Lambda and taking advantage of the high level of integration with other AWS services comes with the risk of vendor lock-in.
  • While the AWS Lambda environment is "not your problem," it's also not at your disposal to extend or modify, nor does it preserve state between function executions.
  • AWS Lambda functions are subject to strict time limitations, and will be aborted if they exceed five minutes of execution time. This can be a problem for some longer-running tasks that are otherwise well-suited to serverless delivery.
Read full review
Google
  • 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)
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
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.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.
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Google
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.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
I have not needed support for AWS Lambda, since it is already using Python, which has resources all over the internet. AWS blog posts have information about how to install some libraries, which is necessary for some more complex operations, but this is available online and didn't require specific customer support for.
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Google
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Azure Functions is another product that provides lambda functionality, but the documentation for some of Azure's products is quite hard to read. Additionally, AWS Lambda was one of the first cloud computing products on a large cloud service that implemented lambda functions, so they have had the most time to develop the product, increase the quality of service, and extend functionality to more languages. Amazon, by far, has the best service for Lambda that I know.
Read full review
Google
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • I was able to perform a lot of processing on data delivered from my website and little or no cost. This was a big plus to me.
  • Programming AWS Lambda is quite easy once you understand the time limits to the functions.
  • AWS Lambda has really good integration with the AWS S3 storage system. This a very good method of delivering data to be processed and a good place to pick it up after processing.
Read full review
Google
  • 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.
Read full review
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