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
Workday Cloud Platform
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Workday Cloud Platform is a PaaS designed to help developers extend the Workday platform.
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.
Workday Cloud Platform is primarily suited for large organizations with individual teams handling various Human Resource functions. Since the data is scattered, Workday is an excellent tool to bring all the data to a single platform and then use Machine Learning techniques to generate both descriptive and prescriptive insights to make sure the skillset portfolio remains updated.
The platform is quite intuitive to use, even a new user would find be comfortable navigating through different options.
As a lead, you can easily track the performance, leaves, and any recruitment in process.
The objective setting process and providing your inputs onto the same is pretty organized, easily accessible. Additionally, one can easily navigate through the historical objectives and performance feedback whenever one wants to review.
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)
Glitching - Occasionally the app will glitch and shut down completely. Sometimes it can be when you are in the middle of something timely, causing frustration and issues. I haven't seen this happen as often recently.
Inbox - It would be helpful if Workday developed a feature to organize inbox tasks based off what department they are for, what the task is and so on. So you can quickly filter or look for the task at hand.
Candidate Tracking - Hiring managers throughout the company work with the HR department to track candidates, schedule interviews and so on. Workday does not always have the best interface in this regard. It could use a feedback feature for hiring managers to be able to be more involved, as they can be on other platforms.
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.
Simple HR tasks are easy to complete (ex, hours, booking time off). It has a clean UI, but not sure we're using the full functionality as only certain tiles are shown.
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.
I give it this rating because, in its current capacity, it does not meet all of Human Resources' needs - which can cost the organization by having to rely on multiple platforms to do what one might be able to do. Again, as mentioned, it works great for what most employees require of it
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.
Workday is an incomplete product, by this I mean it must work alongside other products and does not work by itself. Trying to make several different products work smoothly together becomes very challenging. As compared to ADP products, when purchased all together work very well all together. Also, ADP has extensive Training programs and extensive Customer Support. So ADP's products are far superior to Workday's products in my opinion.
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.
