Craig Finch

Google App Engine is probably best for your use case. It requires the least amount of infrastructure management, and allows you to focus on the application code. App Engine supports Node.js up to version 16 (as of April 2022). If you must use a newer version of Node, then consider another option.

Google Kubernetes Engine can certainly do what you need, but it can also do anything, and you have to have a significant level of expertise in containerizing applications and configuring Kubernetes just to get off the ground. I think Cloud Run is a better choice to compare against App Engine. If your application is already containerized, Cloud Run lets you just run containers, without knowing much about the underlying infrastructure. You can always migrate from Cloud Run to Kubernetes when needed.

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.