Google App Engine vs. Google Compute Engine vs. Quali CloudShell

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

You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.

Incentivized

• LaaS
• IaaS
• PaaS
• CRaaS
• Training
• DevOps
• DevSecOps
• Demo Portals
• TaaS

Almost any workflow and any infrastructure are supported.

• 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

• Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
• Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
• Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs

Incentivized

• Self service single pane of glass for any workflow and infrastructure
• Complete lifecycle management of your workflow and infrastructure
• Vendor agnostic cloud, service, application, appliance support

• 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

• Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
• Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
• Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.

Incentivized

• Requires SME to get the full ROI first year
• Requires a culture change for Agile Automation
• Price could be less (not cheap)

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

Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes

Incentivized

It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.

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 documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

The tool can automate almost any workflow and infrastructure consumption. It has state of the art develop and support with great online training, online full manual set, and a comprehensive support team and network of SIs/VARS that are very qualified.

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 Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.

Incentivized

VMware is too hard to use, too expensive to support, and not a full lifecycle tool for workflows and Infrastructure (no support of physical either). AWS or Azure or Google solutions are good if you are only in the cloud and only using their tools. Not good if you have on-prem or non-Cloud based tools/infrastructure. Build it yourself automation frameworks can be good for people with unlimited funds, but they are not the best way to go and missing many capabilities typically.

It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.

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

• With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
• As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.

Incentivized

• Our customers have an average ROI of less than 6 months.
• Our customers renew their maintenance almost 100% of the time.
• It has allowed us to build specific solutions across many use cases enabling us to profit.