Google App Engine is the perfect tool to scale your app
Updated August 16, 2019

Google App Engine is the perfect tool to scale your app

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google App Engine

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.
  • Google provides this product at a discount to non-profits, so if you are a non-profit, it can save you a lot of money.
  • The auto-scaling feature of the engine can save you a lot of embarrassment and expensive bug fixing.
It's very user-friendly, as you would expect from a Google product. The user interface is well made, but it does take some getting used to. Thankfully, Google has provided lots of resources to master the engine.
Most of the support comes in the form of help articles, as is standard with Google. I have not needed further support. There are also many independent resources, on the web and on Youtube, to help when needed.
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We chose Google App Engine because it supplies the most infrastructure per dollar spent. It's much more expensive to use Amazon EC2 to scale to over a million users. Also, the engine's narrow language support system, while somewhat limiting, makes getting started quickly much easier. It's possible to start testing your app almost immediately, with very little setup required.
Google App Engine is well suited for building and quality assuring an app that you expect will receive heavy traffic. With the click of a button, the engine can simulate 10 million users being active on the app. This can serve as great feedback as you work to scale your product.

Google App Engine Feature Ratings

Ease of building user interfaces
9
Scalability
10
Platform management overhead
9
Workflow engine capability
7
Platform access control
9
Services-enabled integration
8
Development environment creation
8
Development environment replication
7
Issue monitoring and notification
6
Issue recovery
10
Upgrades and platform fixes
9