Google App Engine - perfect for any app looking to modernize!
We have one significant web application. It is used by our entire R&D team across multiple departments as the primary platform for data …
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Overview
Reviews
Popular Features
View all 11 featuresScalability (31)
8.8
88%
Platform access control (30)
8.1
81%
Development environment creation (28)
7.8
78%
Platform management overhead (31)
7.1
71%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
View all pros & cons
Pricing
View all pricingStarting Price
$0.05
Cloud
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Cloud
Per Hour Per Instance
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Features Scorecard
Platform-as-a-Service
8.0
80%
Product Details
What is Google App Engine?
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.
Key Features
Popular Languages
Build applications in Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, or PHP—or bring a
custom language runtime
Open & Flexible
Custom runtimes allows developers to bring any library and framework to App
Engine by supplying a Docker container
Fully Managed
A fully managed environment lets developers focus on code while App Engine
manages infrastructure concerns
Monitoring, Logging & Diagnostics
Google Stackdriver provides application diagnostics to debug and monitor the
health and performance of apps
Application Versioning
Host different versions of applications, create development, test, staging, and
production environments
Traffic Splitting
Route incoming requests to different app versions, A/B test, and do incremental
feature rollouts
Application Security
Help safeguard applications by defining access rules with App Engine firewall
and leverage managed SSL/TLS certificates* by default on a custom domain at no
additional cost
Services Ecosystem
Tap a growing ecosystem of GCP services from applications including a suite of
cloud developer tools
Google App Engine Integrations
Google App Engine Competitors
Google App Engine Technical Details
| Deployment Types | SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Alternatives
View all alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Google App Engine?
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.
What are Google App Engine's top competitors?
CloudFoundry are common alternatives for Google App Engine.
What is Google App Engine's best feature?
Reviewers rate Scalability and Issue monitoring and notification highest, with a score of 8.8.
Who uses Google App Engine?
The most common users of Google App Engine are from Small Businesses and the Computer Software industry.
Reviews and Ratings
(205)
Ratings
Reviews
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Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We have one significant web application. It is used by our entire R&D team across multiple departments as the primary platform for data analysis. We currently have our web application running on Google App Engine flexible as it gives us the ability to run the runtime we need to run.
- Google App Engine is perfect for web applications running a number of services at scale.
- App Engine is flexible enough to run any runtime using the flexible edition.
- App Engine takes a lot of the work off of supporting and maintaining the application
- App Engine could be a little easier to adopt, but it makes sense given the complexity of web applications.
November 01, 2021
App creation and management goodness.
Our organization uses Google App Engine for writing, deploying and testing the code as it requires minimal configuration for testing of code and the code gets covered even in production which is a plus point. It helps in mitigating the errors and deploying and testing the code seamlessly to production.
- Apps get automatically scaled based on the users, more users more instances and app runs smoothly.
- Debugging and monitoring applications is easy even in production it automatically debugs the code.
- It supports a lot of languages like Java, Python, Php, Ruby, etc which adds to the ease of development.
- For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
- For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
- The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.
[Google App Engine] was used by one department for serving various backend APIs.
Its portability and scalability were the main reasons we used it.
The app-engine manageability was totally on Google
Its portability and scalability were the main reasons we used it.
The app-engine manageability was totally on Google
- Fully Managed by Google
- Completely auto-scalable
- Easy to deploy and monitor
- We need to be careful while deployment, there are some drops of requests
- Time in deployment is slightly high
- Exceptions during deployment
April 26, 2021
Google App Engine lives up to its name!
We deployed Moodle(LMS) and Odoo(ERP) applications on Google App Engine using Marketplace available configurations from Bitmani. We are using App Engine to host such client applications. The Google Marketplace saved us many hours of trying to configure these large applications ourselves.
- Google's Marketplace is a great resource. I did not find this on other cloud services.
- Google's billing system is easy and straightforward to understand.
- Google's project based management of resources is good.
- Google dashboard is not so helpful. It does not give a summary of the resource like in AWS.
- Google console should have something like "Recently visited services" of AWS.
- It is hard to install Google Cloud SDK.
April 05, 2021
Good Service
Google App Engine (GAE) as part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is being used across our entire SaaS product. It provides us with an enterprise level infrastructure that can be scaled as our business needs demand very quickly and easily. By not having to build and maintain our own on premise servers, it allows us to focus on our product rather than infrastructure.
- Scale - we can scale instances up/down based on business needs allowing us to meet demand without wasting money for extra capacity
- Cloud Task Queues
- Documentation - The documentation across the board is lacking and often times out of date or just plain wrong.
- Standard instances could provide better support for more tech stacks so that flex and/or custom instances are not required.
June 02, 2021
Great for small teams
We're using Google App Engine to build and host our web application and backend across the organization. This helps us in building a highly scalable applications on a fully managed server-less platform.
- It's very simple to integrate in the application.
- Provides deployment history, so that you can switch back to any instance.
- Fully scalable, so that you can add power as needed.
- They can improve on their documentation.
- Navigation can be made more simple.
- Pricing can be reduced.
We are using Google App Engine in production environment for some applications from our health care insurance model. It allows us to focus on developing applications while Google App Engine handles hosting. It is easy to deploy and run.
- Serverless is easy to manage and scale up and down resources.
- Ease to deploy.
- Monitoring and troubleshooting are not so easy.
- Creates vendor lock-in
February 12, 2020
A good alternative for application deployment, Google App Engine
We at our organisation use Google App Engine to test and deploy dynamic internal contents. As Google App Engine is able to work with multi language support, it is beneficial for small to large tasks wherever we require serverless infrastructure. It is easy to deploy and run comparing to full machine infrastructure, as Google App Engine is part of Google Cloud services, we can use it separately along with VM instances as well wherever required.
- It is one of the best alternatives of full machine for small applications.
- It takes less time to implement/deploy or run applications on GAE.
- According to me, worst thing with GAE is it's very expensive when we compare with regular implementations.
- It has fewer tutorials or documentations, so a little bit hard to implement at the first time.
October 16, 2019
Google App Engine is a true modern wonder.
Google App Engine is in use for nearly every internal system and tool that we have developed, as well as a large amount of systems and tools that we have developed for our customers. It is used by our development team to build integrations between systems, build web pages, build cron jobs and automation workflows, and really anything else we need.
Our internal IT team uses it to deploy other systems like a Grab and Go program for Chromebooks (open sourced) and time approval mechanisms.
Our internal IT team uses it to deploy other systems like a Grab and Go program for Chromebooks (open sourced) and time approval mechanisms.
- Extremely low cost option for web page deployment. It so simple to prototype or even offer a service by using your favourite app servering platform like Django, Flask, etc.
- Incredible scaling. App Engine scales up and down with ease, automatically, and never fails to serve your app.
- Ease of deployment. Google documentation is clear and concise, plus it's extremely extensible. It's easy to learn how to do this!
- Support. It's not frequent at all that we reach out with support questions, but it is sometimes hard to get answers.
- Roadmap visibility. Transitions and deprecations are hard to track and therefore may be hard to plan for!
August 16, 2019
Expensive, Cutting Edge and Highly Recommended
We use Google App Engine for content distribution of digital publishing assets as well as analytics and authentication services for a wide array of platforms. The whole organization uses Google App Engine in some capacity or another. The business problems it addresses are virtualizing services and abstracting away server configuration, load balancing, software updates and everything else we would have to do to set up the same infrastructure on a classic web server stack. Google App Engine has expedited our development and deployment processes tremendously so we can continue innovating with new services, getting them up and running quickly, while trusting that our existing services are running on a rock solid cloud platform backend.
- 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.
- Documentation does not always keep up with the latest changes to the service. Google App Engine has undergone a lot of changes these past couple of years. At times, we were surprised to find out that something we didn't think was possible was, or, conversely, something that was supposed to work fine which had been deprecated. We also ended up using some undocumented features and weren't sure whether they would keep working or not.
- Price. Google App Engine isn't cheap. But, you get what you pay for. Rock solid service, great tools, at a hefty price.
- Difficult to tell how to optimize costs. We racked up the expenses and it is still a mystery where all the costs are being incurred.
- Some intimidating or arcane aspects of configuration. Most of it was a breeze but every now and then something would be pretty far out and require a few of us developers putting our heads together to figure it out.
- Sometimes required reading source code to figure out how to do something. Not a ton of examples of how to do various things, nor Stack Overflow posts, at least in the beginning. I imagine this will change as the community grows. But sometimes it felt like we were all alone trying to figure out how to do things.
September 24, 2019
Google App Engine - simple application hosting at Google scale
I enjoy using Google App Engine because it allows me to focus on developing applications while GAE handles hosting and scaling.
- Multiple backend frameworks to choose from
- Reasonable pricing and generous free quotas
- Scalability
- Not every language/framework is supported
- Certain APIs have somewhat lower quotas
- Google can choose to deprecate features at any time
August 23, 2019
A good application overall
It is used to develop and host web applications. It is very helpful in its versatility.
- Monitoring and operations.
- Backups.
- SSL security.
- Price.
- No multi-threading.
August 20, 2019
Google App Engine: Easy to Write that first Serverless App
Google App Engine is a managed Serverless Platform that easy allows users to create managed serverless platforms with just code. Instead of having to manage servers as well, the complexity is simplified so that the code and the application become the focus. The Engineering department has found uses for the application to minimize maintenance overhead.
- Minimizing maintenance overhead
- Multiple languages supported
- Decouples need for platform support knowledge and experience
- Less configurability than conventional infrastructure based solutions
- Creates vendor lock-in with platform specific options and tuning
- Limited points of presence when compared with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
August 18, 2019
App Engine Review!
App Engine is a fantastic service for developers who want to be able to run their code in an environment that they do not have to provision -- there is no manual server configuration or maintenance, etc, and all the developer needs to be concerned about is how their code works.
- Removes the need for manual server configuration, management, orchestration, etc
- Interfaces incredibly well with other GCP services, like Cloud Functions and Firebase
- It is not the most cost-efficient hosting provider and could continue to improve from a cost basis
- Google's UI can be confusing for newcomers when managing an App Engine deployment
It serves all our traffic to end users, which is basically one of the most important things for our organization.
- Serving traffic to end users. It can scale automatically when traffic spikes.
- The standard environment has some limitations, but it encourages you to write "scalable" code.
- With Flexible Environment, you can serve any Docker container you want, still taking advantage of auto scaling.
- Easy integration with other Google Cloud products, e.g. Datastore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, etc.
- Flexible environment needs scaling to zero and support for all APIs available in Standard Environment like ndb for Python and Task Queue.
- Standard Environment needs to update some outdated libraries like lxml for Python.
- Instance pricing of Standard Environment could be lowered, since it wasn't updated for many years.
August 15, 2019
Google App Engine's best feature is cloud endpoint
We are currently evaluating Google App engine as a platform as a service to our customers. The Google App Engine cloud endpoints is equivalent to Microsoft Azure's web apps or API apps. We are impressed with its ability to deploy Java or Python based RestFul API directly to Cloud endpoints. I coded the logic in the RestFul API to access Google's Cloud DataStore (kind-entity-property type of data store). Google's SDK made it easy to integrate its App Engine with its storage solutions. I have not tried its Cloud Bigtable from Cloud endpoints but I'm sure it's on our next task list.
Google App Engine's primary programming language is Java. I tried JetBrain's IntelliJ IDEA for managing Google App engine cloud endpoint projects. I used the community edition, which had less support for Google App Engine Cloud endpoint. The enterprise edition should have better support.
For those who prefer to use Python, JetBrains may have just released PyCharm for $99. Nothing comes for free. If you work at a company that has those licenses, you should feel lucky. Having a good IDE is critical to productivity. It has a "PyCharm Free Educational (Classroom) License" for free.
- Auto scale application load.
- Platform as a Service feature abstracts the web server layer.
- Perfect for Android or iOS app server logic development.
- Connect to different Google storage types.
- Able to use C# as the programming language in its SDK.
- Integration with Visual studio C# for using Google app engine cloud endpoint SDK.
- Documentation on choosing a IDE to get started. Doing things in the command line is too basic. It's good to know them but having a sophisticated IDE is the next step to achieve higher productivity.
April 14, 2018
GCP hits the nail on the head. (Sometimes)
[It's being used for] Testing across various departments (Skunkworks. POCs, including Apigee API Gateway).
- Client SDK and examples for integrating with services (Datastore/Storage/Pub/Sub).
- Lightweight deployment code/config (lightweight YAML).
- Autoscale (configuration and runtime).
- Flexible runtimes.
- Missing scheduler as a service. Has static cron, but no fault-tolerant, dynamic scheduling as a service. Azure has this.
- Documentation. Documentation can be stale, to terse, cumbersome to navigate.
- Deploy time and CI. Azure has Git hooks and auto update built in. So from commit to live can be under one minute. GCP more manual, and closer to 5+ min for same.
Google App Engine (GAE) is the core engine for a specialized web application in-house product. The web application allows the sales department staff to produce reporting, follow up regarding multiple deposit amounts, do the link between Google Drive (as a hosting cloud) and electronic signatures of clients. The web app is also responsible for the "after sales" process and also allows us to maintain the customers' database.
- Well suited for doing asynchronous long running process jobs through task queues
- Supports for huge files upload process (fast and efficient)
- Integrates pretty well with Java and Spring MVC technologies
- Although GAE does support relational databases if you pay for it, developers wanting to try GAE for free are forced to use cloud datastore which is a NoSQL database.
- Logging is recorded and accessible through a web console. However, there is no easy way (I mean through the console) to display a custom log line format like it's possible with slf4j or log4j logging patterns. This makes reading log inefficient.
- The GAE plugins for Eclipse are buggy and inconsistent. Many times we are forced to reboot the local server after a full webapp recompile, and the command line SDK is not intuitive.
May 24, 2017
Google App Engine for Quick Deployments
We use it across the organization to host various internal projects and for a variety of support-level tools we use in house. Mostly PHP and NodeJS apps, some are pre-built apps that run great on app engine, others are built in house and are tailored to very specific needs that various groups or clients need.
- Very flexible, runs PHP, Node, Java, Go, etc.
- Standard environments with regards to the stack being used.
- Now part of Google Cloud.
- Documentation for certain things is lacking.
- Better tutorials for certain stacks.
Google App Engine is used in the IT department to host the organization's website, manage the scaling as well as ongoing maintenance and updates, and to build the web application in PHP and Python, serverless, without the inhouse management of the website's underlying infrastructure and platform.
- Google App Engine APIs to build and deploy the web app was straightforward and very easy.
- Since Google App Engine is fully managed and serverless, the web app auto scales up and down based on the workload.
- Google App Engine is expensive in the long run and cost adds up pretty quickly.
- Since it is fully managed and serverless, you have no access to underlying infrastructure and OS that may be needed for some fine tuned and complex web apps.
October 31, 2019
A reliable web application hosting platform
We use Google App Engine to house many of our mission-critical web applications with zero downtime. It solves the need to have 100% uptime with no added long term equipment costs and additional IT support staff.
- Ease to deploy.
- Flexible ability to scale to meet increases in users.
- Ability to program in various languages allowing for different development teams to work with it.
- The ability to only run web applications. If it could also run self-executing non-web based applications it could be used more heavily.
- It only allows the use of the Google Cloud store which limits the ability to use other cloud stores already in use in the enterprise.
- It's a closed API that can lock into being dependent entirely on Google. There are many open-source projects ongoing that can help to alleviate.
January 15, 2020
Awesome experience on Google App Engine
We are using Google App Engine as a primary backend of our location-based application. We developed a mobile application to track our company cab live location tracking. So we were planning to store the data to the Google App Engine. From there, we fetch and show the data as reports in the other admin application.
- It helped us to maintain mass data like live location data.
- They offered some free quota as well.
- We noticed that sometimes the backend returns the connection exception, but the data is inserted successfully in the database. This needs to resolve as per my experience on this.
August 19, 2019
App Engine!
I use Google App Engine to program in Python for data collection and data mining. This is solely being used for engineering and development. It solves the issue of having to manage your own server and allows your apps to be accessed from anywhere there is a computer and internet access. This makes it convenient for sharing between coworkers.
- Coding environment
- Create test environments
- Have a history of all builds
- Not free
August 16, 2019
Google App Engine is the perfect tool to scale your app
Google App Engine is used by my organization's web development department. We use Google App Engine to build and quality assess new web apps that the department is working on because it requires no new infrastructure or servers. We are able to effectively test the app's scalability without having to pay large fees to do so.
- The scalability testing of Google App Engine is top notch. You can quickly and efficiently test if your new app will support millions of users.
- Google App Engine is an out-of-box platform, in that it allows the user to begin development and testing immediately, with no further services needed.
- Google App Engine's version controlling allows for effective quality assurance. If you make a mistake and the app breaks, you can rollback the update and debug.
- With a 99.9+% uptime, Google App Engine is very reliable (as are all Google products).
- Google App Engine has its own version of SQL called GQL which is inferior to straight SQL. This means a steeper learning curve.
- The documentation on best practices for the platform is lacking.
- No support for C# is a frustrating limitation.
November 11, 2015
University Final Year Project Review
I used Google App Engine in my final year project to store news stories relating to crime in a database and then plot them on a Google Map depending on whether they were "crime" stories or not.
- Database management
- User Friendly
- Excellent GUI
- Provide webinars
- Implement modules in college and Universities to use the product
- Give regular seminars to students and businesses