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Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Overview

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.

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Recent Reviews

Good Service

10 out of 10
April 05, 2021
Incentivized
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 …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 11 features
  • Scalability (31)
    9.0
    90%
  • Development environment creation (28)
    8.9
    89%
  • Platform access control (30)
    8.9
    89%
  • Platform management overhead (31)
    8.9
    89%
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Pricing

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Starting 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
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Product Demos

MapReduce Made Easy With Google App Engine

YouTube

Creating an android application with Google App Engine backend

YouTube
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Features

Platform-as-a-Service

Platform as a Service is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient

8.7
Avg 8.2
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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 TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

CloudFoundry are common alternatives for Google App Engine.

Reviewers rate Ease of building user interfaces and Scalability and Workflow engine capability highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Google App Engine are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(231)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-35 of 35)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Andre Masson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Scenarios where Google App Engine is well suited:
  • Allows endpoints for automatic email retrieval process which acts as long running jobs processes
  • "Cron" like web process launchable through simple endpoint URL
  • Java Spring MVC web application or RESTful web services integrated with single page applications (SPA)
Scenarios where it is less appropriate:
  • If your web application requires a short starting time GAE does not perform fast startups. However once started the web app has constant and stable processing speed
  • If the development team is looking for very well integrated product suite (like IDE well integrated with the backend server) then GAE requires much more improvements
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use it for in house education application. We implemented it with Django. It controls our education management system. We use Django and Google F1 database. Sometimes we have problems with sending emails and reaching quota. The control panel do not reach the quota but we can send email. After that we aware that controls update information very slow. Except for sending email everything works very good.
  • On demand quota change.
  • Django.
  • Almost good admin control panel.
  • Flexibility.
  • They should provide more examples for developers.
  • They should decrease their prices.
  • They should improve the quota notification system.
Google App Engine is well suited If you want to use simple deployment for your Django application and if you want to change to an old version of your application when you get a fail on your application without any extra effort. This is really good scenario for developers. You don't need any system engineers to control your application. I like that.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Google App Engine for my personal homepage.
  • Low maintenance
  • Good uptime
  • Low cost
  • Admin user interface
  • Deployment of apps
  • Support for programming languages
Google App Engine is well suited for simple workloads.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Apps across our entire organization for email, calendaring, collaboration ( via Google Docs, Sheets, Sites, Hangouts, etc…) directory, archiving and retention, as well as social and video delivery (YouTube). The primary use of Google Apps in our organization is for corporate email. The platform is stable and reliable. Our users are familiar with the interface, keeping training requirements low.
  • Robust email system.
  • Easy to understand document sharing.
  • The calendar integrates well with email.
  • The Apps have limitations. Be sure you are OK with those limitations before you install. Google has not been responsive to feature requests.
  • Managing Calendar without a third-party tool is nearly impossible.
  • Integration with Active Directory is kludgy at best. Do NOT expect the integration to be smooth or the functionality robust.
If your installation relies on Active Directory integration, you may want to consider the product from the company in Redmond, WA instead. In my opinion, this is Google Apps weakness.
Jennie Masterson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Will the person be able to use it to it's full potential?
October 20, 2015

Try GAE for a change!

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google App Engine is used for hosting an application by one of the teams in our department. The application is responsible for handling file storage and access levels for two major components that are owned by two different teams. Google Cloud Storage is used for hosting these files.
  • Google App Engine offers the platform to develop an end to end application without the need of having any other software installed.
  • Google App Engine allows rapid deployment of applications and immediate availability of the code deployed in the cloud.
  • Google App Engine offers services that allow you to quickly prototype any application and have it deployed at a minimal cost. The console allows you to view and manage the status of your application so that everything can be done from a developer perspective without the involvement of the Ops team.
  • I feel that the restrictions regarding no threads, no writing of files to the disk and so on, are great for keeping things secure however they can be real blockers sometimes and make it very difficult to find workarounds for problems that you are trying to solve while developing your application.
  • The 12 simultaneous connections limit to the database instance from an instance cannot be increased, so the available performance options can sometimes be not enough for heavy load apps.
  • The customer service is always responsive when we open support tickets however there isn't an offering for assistance on site if needed or consultations regarding best practices.
A scenario where Google App Engine is well suited is when you want to develop a quick prototype and you don't have servers as an infrastructure option and you just need to have something running quick. Also make sure the app doesn't need to create new threads, write to the file system, or use Java classes outside of the JRE class whitelist.
October 09, 2015

Good App Engine (GAE)

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Google App Engine solution is helping an entirely new category of applications that process data in real-time and at scale very robustly. It has faster, easier, more detailed simulations and solutions for all cloud related requirements. We use Google App Engine to develop and deploy both internal and public web applications. The APIs for accessing the datastore are very easy to use.
  • The APIs for accessing the datastore are very easy to use.
  • Implementing text indexing and search related applications perform better on Google App Engine compared to other app engines.
  • Reliable NoSQL datastore, including atomic transactions and a query engine.
  • Developers have read-only access to the filesystem on Google App Engine.
  • Google App Engine limits the maximum rows returned from an entity get to 1000 rows per Datastore call.
  • Not suitable for CPU intensive calculations.
Google App Engine's infrastructure removes many of the system administration and development challenges of building applications to scale to millions of hits. Google handles deploying code to a cluster, monitoring, failover, and launching application instances as necessary.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
App Engine allows organizations to leverage the Google Apps APIs and get easy access to some functionality that is not available the standard Google Apps users. For example, the ability to maintain your user's meta data, such as their business title, department, work address, work phone number, cell phone number etc. These are not available in the Google Apps Control Panel, but with some coding on Google App Engine, you can create the interface that allows users to self-manage their own meta data. This just one example of leveraging Google App Engine to complement a Google Apps rollout.
  • Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
  • Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
  • Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.
  • 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 well suited for most web applications, especially when you are unsure about the amount of traffic you are expecting to have. Knowing that App Engine will scale up and down automatically gives you a peace of mind that your application will not crash if demand suddenly increases! And you don't need to worry about paying for a high end solution with redundancy and load balancing built in - as App Engine handles all of that - and you only pay for the resources you actually use.
Paul Ford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use is based on client or project needs. It is used mainly as a cloud based API service so that corporate enterprise systems can leverage it internally or with other service dependent applications.
  • Cloud based RESTful APIs
  • Access to big data resources for reporting and analytics
  • Custom Cloud web hosted applications
  • Cost, speed, ease of adoption
  • Implemented a custom company based web site using Vosao on GAE CMS
  • Administration and management - more Azure like portal
  • Better reporting on forecasted and actual usage via notifications.
  • Better documentation, examples. More use case centric documentation.
  • Learning curve is relatively short.
  • Integration to Eclipse is awesome.
  • Integration with standard frameworks is getting better - I would not recommend loading entire spring framework on it, but aspects of it are more useful.
Christopher McLain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Google App Engine for multiple databases.
  • There's a fairly high free quota which makes it easy for startup to use a cloud database.
  • It's extremely scalable if you need it to be.
  • If you know Python, it's fairly easy setup
  • Google App Engine has it's own SQL (called GQL) that takes some getting used to.
  • It's based on Python 2.7, which is an old version and it doesn't have support for every module.
It's perfect for a dynamic database for a startup website since you can coast for a while under the free quota.
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