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 Kubernetes Engine
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Kubernetes Engine supplies containerized application management powered by Kubernetes which includes Google Cloud services including load balancing, automatic scaling and upgrade, and other Google Cloud services.
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.
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.
The Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it. Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:
Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services.
Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible
Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure
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)
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.
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.
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.
Very good Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.
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.
GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.
When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence.
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.
Positive: Allowed us to start and produce working software regardless of our experience level.
Positive: Integration with other Google Cloud services that we wanted to use anyway.
Negative: It's kinda clunky, and some scenarios seem Google Kubernetes Engine-specific instead of being more integrated with other Google Cloud services or the web UI.
