Google App Engine vs. Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

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

An effective pricing strategy is in place. Google Cloud VPC is the most secure since it runs on a private network and never contacts the public network. Google is well-known for its AI/ML and Kubernetes engines, both of which have a leg up on the competition. Google Cloud VPC's database services are yet to be improved.

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

• Serverless connector helps Cloud Run services to communicate privately.
• Serverless connector supports auto scaling.
• Being serverless, the cost is based on usage for serverless connector.

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

• Sometimes the group settings tab lags a little
• Although overall it's easy to use, some of the sections lack documentation
• Routes section is very poorly implemented, requires a lot of digging to learn how to use

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

VPC is a difficult concept to grasp and recommendations for configuring it would be helpful in educating the users to make the right choice while using the product in configuring networking for their cloud deployments. Also, the user interface can be intuitively designed so as to suggest templates to perform common configurations with regard to VPC.

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

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

Google VPC and networking infrastructure is very matured and is built later after Amazon VPC. It made sure to address all the limitations faced by amazon VPC. Google Virtual private cloud is across regions while amazon VPC covers only one region but multiple zones. Google VPC is a global resource while AWS is a regional resource.

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

• Using Google Cloud VPC cloud storage has saved us on infra budget and per TB storage cost
• Using MySQL databases on Google Cloud VPC has improved the performance and cost of operation and maintenance
• Better pricing model has improvement on operational cost and increased revenue

Incentivized