Google App Engine: The powerful, predictable, pay-as-you-go Platform-As-A-Service
Updated March 18, 2015

Google App Engine: The powerful, predictable, pay-as-you-go Platform-As-A-Service

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

1.9.0+

Overall Satisfaction with Google App Engine

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)
  • Quick turnaround on building out an enterprise ready solution.
  • Developers only need to worry about their code, and not need to worry about the hardware, load-balancing, high availability etc.
  • RunMyProcess by Fujitsu
RunMyProcess is a good solution if you have a relatively straight forward workflow application. However, this solution charges for every page load of the application. If you have a large enterprise customer, these costs can quickly jump if thousands of people are accessing the application on a regular basis. App Engine's cost are really minimal compared to RunMyProcess.
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.

Using Google App Engine

It is stable, and have not had any incidents of downtime related to the platform.

Using Google App Engine