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
Google Cloud Run
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Run enables users to build and deploy scalable containerized apps written in any language (including Go, Python, Java, Node.js, .NET, and Ruby) on a fully managed platform. Cloud Run can be paired with other container ecosystem tools, including Google's Cloud Build, Cloud Code, Artifact Registry, and Docker. And it features out-of-the-box integration with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, and Error Reporting to ensure the health of an application.
It has a similar purpose in terms of hosting and orchestrating applications in Docker containers. GoogleCloud Run stands out for being much easier and more intuitive to maintain and configure, and can even be used by teams with little knowledge of container orchestration …
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.
Microservices and RestFul API application as it is fast and reliant. Seamless integration with event triggers such as pubsub or event arc, so you can easily integrate that with usecases with file uploads, database changes, etc. Basically great with short-lived tasks, if however, you have long-running processses, Cloud Run might not be idle for this. For example if you have a long running data processing task, other solutions such as kubeflow pipelines or dataflow are more suited for this kind of tasks. Cloud Run is also stateless, so if you need memory, you will have to connect an external database.
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)
The UI can be made simpler. Currently the UI is bloated and it takes time to find out what you want
More integrations with container registry providers (ECR, dockerhub)
Better permissions UX. Currently GCP requires service accounts to be used with cloud products, the experience adding/removing permissions is difficult to navigate
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.
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
The UI/console is great... the documentation is top-notch for developers, but the CLI itself when you have to script around it is very complex and easy to forget some options... the downside of a generic command line client.
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.
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.
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.