Item: Google App Engine
Rating: 10
Author: Tristan Dobbs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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!

Return on Investment

App Engine has reduced the cost of deploying internal systems on full VMs.
App Engine has reduced internal support on systems where a full OS would have taken much more management.
Sub-minute billing has reduced the cost of using another Cloud platform when times of heavy activity would have increased our costs unnecessarily.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.

Support Rating

Support could be better. There is so much self-help and documentation available for Google App Engine that it is easy to find answers, but if something is a real issue, it can be a hassle to work through support to get to the right person. Make sure to set up StackDriver!

Key Insights

Do you think Google App Engine delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Google App Engine's feature set?

Yes

Did Google App Engine live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Google App Engine go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google App Engine again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Classroom, Google Hangouts, Google App Maker, Google BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Spanning Backup for G Suite, Mavenlink, Freshdesk, LumApps, BetterCloud, Certify

Likelihood to Recommend

App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect.

If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like Google Compute Engine or another managed service.

Google App Engine is a true modern wonder.

Overall Satisfaction with Google App Engine