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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

(232)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 35)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Naresh Chaudhary | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Email servers are good with email delivery in inbox.
  • It enables uploading data to web applications.
  • We're able to manage multiple applications with a single dashboard which has a great UI.
  • Some more documentation and tutorials would help a lot.
  • I would like to see integration with more open source applications.
  • I would like more options to choose different UI themes.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Cameron Gable | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Rudolph Pereira | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Tristan Dobbs | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
  • 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 18, 2019

App Engine Review!

Joshua Dickson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Dmitry Sadovnychyi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Jonah Dempcy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Hil Liao | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Supports all popular languages (and you can even bring your own language runtime)
  • Built-in automatic scaling is great
  • Lags behind competing platforms (Azure, AWS) in terms of features
  • Less documentation, examples, etc. as compared to competitors' platforms
Robert Christian | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Works with OSx
  • Creates cohesive workflow
  • Allows for easy collaboration
  • Sheets is not as robust as Excel.
  • Hangouts seems to lack some of the resolution you get with Skype.
  • It does not tie well with AD when using another solution like Office 365.
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