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
Vercel
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Vercel (made by the creators of Next.js) is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions for a workflow. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration.
The platform aims to enable frontend teams to work while combining the best developer experience with a focus on end-user performance.
N/A
Pricing
Google App Engine
Vercel
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google App Engine
Vercel
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google App Engine
Vercel
Features
Google App Engine
Vercel
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
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.
I've had nothing but positive experiences with Vercel, and while their business offering is great, it's also worth touching on their free plan. Their free plan allows me to tinker with web development in my free time without having to worry about paying for a costly linux box. I just link a GitHub repository and it's done!
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.
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
Vercel's good usability and developer experience make me happy to visit their website when I need to configure my deployments. It's very easy to navigate, configure, and manage my projects, and the developer experience is so seamless that I don't have to think much when I push changes to git.
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.
Vercel beats Heroku and DigitalOcean by a mile with pricing. Since Vercel uses serverless infrastructure, we don't pay for servers that don't get used, which is great for smaller platforms. Vercel Support is also very quick to respond, unlike DigitalOcean who took a while to get back to me after they didn't honor platform credits they sent me.
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.
