Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine

Overview

Google App Engine

Stacks10.5K

Followers8.1K

Votes611

Google Compute Engine

Stacks12.4K

Followers9.2K

Votes423

Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine, highlighting the key differences between the two services.

Pricing and Billing Model: Google App Engine primarily follows a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, where users pay based on resource consumption and application scaling. On the other hand, Google Compute Engine operates under the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, allowing users to have more control over virtual machine instances and the associated costs.
Scalability and Managed Services: Google App Engine is designed to automatically scale the applications based on demand, providing managed services such as load balancing, auto-scaling, and database management, allowing developers to focus more on code. Conversely, Google Compute Engine provides more control over virtual machine instances, enabling users to manually configure and scale resources according to their specific requirements.
Application Compatibility: Google App Engine supports a limited set of programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Go), and applications need to adhere to the App Engine runtime environment. Google Compute Engine, on the other hand, offers more flexibility by supporting various operating systems as well as a wider range of programming languages, making it suitable for a broader range of application types.
Networking and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Google App Engine provides a fully-managed environment with limited networking options. It operates within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region and does not have direct access to resources outside of GCP. In contrast, Google Compute Engine offers more networking flexibility, including options to create virtual private clouds (VPCs) and establish VPN connections, allowing users to extend their on-premises networks to the virtual machines running on GCP.
Server Management and Configuration: Google App Engine abstracts the underlying server infrastructure, relieving users from the burden of server management and configuration. In contrast, Google Compute Engine requires users to have more sysadmin knowledge as they have direct control over virtual machine instances, including the ability to customize server configurations and install custom software.

In summary, Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine differ in terms of their pricing and billing models, scalability and managed services, application compatibility, networking capabilities, and server management options. These distinctions make them suitable for different use cases and cater to varying user requirements in terms of flexibility, control, and cost.

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Advice on Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine

Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.

In both cases, the instance much be shut down.

There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.

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Detailed Comparison

Google App Engine	Google Compute Engine
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.	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.
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.	High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.;Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.;(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.;Load balancing- Native load-balancing technology helps you spread incoming network traffic across a pool of instances, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput and availability at low cost.;Fast and easy provisioning- Quickly deploy large clusters of virtual machines with intuitive tools including a RESTful API, command-line interface and web-based Console. You can also use tools such as RightScale and Scalr to automatically manage your deployment.;Compliance and security- All data written to disk in Compute Engine is encrypted at rest using the AES-128-CBC algorithm. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.
Statistics
Stacks 10.5K	Stacks 12.4K
Followers 8.1K	Followers 9.2K
Votes 611	Votes 423
Pros & Cons
Pros 145 Easy to deploy 106 Auto scaling 80 Good free plan 62 Easy management 56 Scalability	Pros 87 Backed by google 79 Easy to scale 75 High-performance virtual machines 57 Performance 52 Fast and easy provisioning
Integrations
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Twilio Twilio SendGrid	RightScale Qubole Scalr Boundary Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Kinvey New Relic Twilio SendGrid Zencoder

What are some alternatives to Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine?

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.

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.

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Related Comparisons

Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine, highlighting the key differences between the two services.

Pricing and Billing Model: Google App Engine primarily follows a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, where users pay based on resource consumption and application scaling. On the other hand, Google Compute Engine operates under the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, allowing users to have more control over virtual machine instances and the associated costs.
Scalability and Managed Services: Google App Engine is designed to automatically scale the applications based on demand, providing managed services such as load balancing, auto-scaling, and database management, allowing developers to focus more on code. Conversely, Google Compute Engine provides more control over virtual machine instances, enabling users to manually configure and scale resources according to their specific requirements.
Application Compatibility: Google App Engine supports a limited set of programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Go), and applications need to adhere to the App Engine runtime environment. Google Compute Engine, on the other hand, offers more flexibility by supporting various operating systems as well as a wider range of programming languages, making it suitable for a broader range of application types.
Networking and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Google App Engine provides a fully-managed environment with limited networking options. It operates within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region and does not have direct access to resources outside of GCP. In contrast, Google Compute Engine offers more networking flexibility, including options to create virtual private clouds (VPCs) and establish VPN connections, allowing users to extend their on-premises networks to the virtual machines running on GCP.
Server Management and Configuration: Google App Engine abstracts the underlying server infrastructure, relieving users from the burden of server management and configuration. In contrast, Google Compute Engine requires users to have more sysadmin knowledge as they have direct control over virtual machine instances, including the ability to customize server configurations and install custom software.

Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine

Overview

Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?