CloudPATH vs. Google App Engine

I have recommended it to our other US office locations. My recommendation is based on the benefit of managed enrollment, the ability to have multiple enrollment pathways and the added bonus of having a common platform across all of our corporate sites improving IT support, management and user familiarity with wireless device enrollment while at work.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Self-service certificated enrollment process allows authorized users to authenticate and join the network.
• We deploy multiple enrollment paths and scenarios based on the user and the device specifications.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Enrollment for some mobile device platforms has been a constant struggle.
• OS platform restriction is only possible via certificated enrollment process.

Incentivized

• 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)

Incentivized

We like when a product works and we don't have to look for alternate solutions, add network project change over downtime and retrain staff. Even the limitations (some devices don't enroll well) and recent licensing changes do not precipitate a change in our desire to continue with the product. The cloudpath support has provided clear alternatives for our issues and we are able to keep business going with minimal impact on staff and support

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I had to revisit the UI after a year of just setting up and forgetting. The UI got some improvements but the amount of navigation we have to go through to setup a new app has increased but also got easier to setup. Gemini now is integrated and make getting answers faster

Incentivized

We have had to raise a lot of support tickets during our three years of service. We do get timely support on those tickets and there have only been a few issues which have had an extended troubleshooting time that might have exceeded our expected resolution timeframe.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The pricing was better for us and that was our deciding factor in making the decision to go with CloudPATH. We did test both solutions in our pilot environment and while we liked the features of the Cisco solution and deploy other Cisco solutions and products the pricing was a significant factor in our decision process.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We have improved auditing of users accessing the network and on what devices.
• We have greater control over access to our network, including the ability to restrict access during non-business hours.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized