The DigitalOcean App Platform enables developers to build, deploy, and scale apps on what they describe as a simple, fully managed PaaS.
Users of the former Nanobox, acquired by DigitalOcean in 2019, have been migrated to the App Platform upon Nanobox's end of life in March 2021.
$5
per month
Google App Engine
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.
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 company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.
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.
It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small scale deployment and the process to setup an account and roll out your app via marketplace is easy and cheap.
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.
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.
