Overview

Google App Engine

Stacks10.4K

Followers8.1K

Votes611

Google Cloud Platform

Stacks26.2K

Followers14.1K

Votes18

Google App Engine vs Google Cloud Platform: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here is a comparison between Google App Engine (GAE) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Scalability: Google App Engine is a fully managed platform that automatically scales your applications based on demand, allowing you to handle high traffic without worrying about infrastructure. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, provides a wide range of infrastructure services that can be customized for scalability, giving you more flexibility in managing your own resources.
Pricing Model: Google App Engine follows a simple pricing model where you pay for the resources consumed by your application, such as storage, CPU usage, and network bandwidth. With Google Cloud Platform, you have more granular control over pricing, as you can choose the type and size of each individual service you need, allowing for more cost optimization.
Service Offering: Google App Engine is primarily focused on hosting web applications, supporting multiple programming languages and frameworks. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, offers a wider range of services including virtual machines, containers, managed databases, analytics, machine learning, and more, giving you the ability to build complex applications and infrastructure.
Flexibility: Google App Engine provides a simplified and opinionated framework for developing applications, with certain restrictions on the runtime environment and available libraries. Google Cloud Platform offers more flexibility as you can choose your own programming language, runtime, and customize the infrastructure according to your specific needs.
Deployment and Management: Google App Engine simplifies the deployment and management process by handling infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and monitoring automatically. In Google Cloud Platform, you have more control over the deployment process, allowing you to choose from multiple deployment methods such as virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions, and giving you more flexibility in managing the lifecycle of your applications.
Integration with Other Google Services: Google App Engine provides seamless integration with other Google services such as Firebase, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, and more, making it easy to build end-to-end solutions. While Google Cloud Platform also integrates with these services, it provides a broader range of options and integrations with other third-party services as well.

In Summary, Google App Engine and Google Cloud Platform offer different approaches to application development and infrastructure management. GAE is a fully managed platform focused on simplicity and scalability, while GCP provides a wider range of services with more flexibility and customization options.

Advice on Google App Engine, Google Cloud Platform

Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Google App Engine	Google Cloud Platform
Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.	It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.
Zero to sixty: Scale your app automatically without worrying about managing machines.;Supercharged APIs: Supercharge your app with services such as Task Queue, XMPP, and Cloud SQL, all powered by the same infrastructure that powers the Google services you use every day.;You're in control: Manage your application with a simple, web-based dashboard allowing you to customize your app's performance.	Scales automatically; No server management
Statistics
Stacks 10.4K	Stacks 26.2K
Followers 8.1K	Followers 14.1K
Votes 611	Votes 18
Pros & Cons
Pros 145 Easy to deploy 106 Auto scaling 80 Good free plan 62 Easy management 56 Scalability	Pros 5 Good app Marketplace for Beginner and Advanced User 4 1 year free trial credit USD300 3 Live chat support 3 Cheap 3 Premium tier IP address
Integrations
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Twilio Twilio SendGrid	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Google App Engine, Google Cloud Platform?

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.