Google App Engine Reviews & Product Details

Google app engine allows you to focus on writing on your code without having to worry about all the underlying infrastructure. This allows for a "code first" mentality. Developers can focus on building applications without having to worry about things like dependencies. App Engine seamlessly connects to other Google services such as data store and cloud SQL. Best of all, app engine can scale as required and can even scale to zero in order to avoid incurring charges. If you want more control over infrastructure, you can switch to app Engine flex and modify the underlying infrastructure as required.

Google app Engine standard requires your code to be written in very specific languages. This feels a bit restrictive and if code would like to be written in any other language, the upgrade to app Engine flex can be a bit steep.

If you just want to write your code, have it scale and not worry about the infrastructure overheard, Google app Engine is the way to go.

Google app Engine enabled me to simply take my code and deploy it anywhere without having to worry about any infrastructure related issues. This has rapidly reduced development time as before a considerable amount of time would be spent in just preparing the environment for the code.

Google App Engine makes it very easy to deploy an application with minimal manifest configuration and a simple CLI command. It "just works" and your app starts running very quickly. The ability to sort through and redeploy past deployments as well as the logging provided for your deployed application is very nice as well.

App Engine does not make it very clear/easy to deploy multiple applications to the same service, or whether or not that is even best practice. It's definitely possible, but it doesn't feel as clean as it should be. My intuition was that App Engine was restricted to a single Application per GC project, but that is clearly not the case.

Make sure that its abstraction level suits the needs of your Application.

We use App Engine for some of our smaller web services that don't get used very frequently but did quite seem to fit the serverless function model.

The engine uses the latest features and java interface for powering the program or the developer while providing the required ram requests so that the application can function with fewer issues. This is especially critical in the Beta phase.

There weren't many issues the company and myself conquered during the test phase. The main issues lied with the developer options which were not as advanced as we thought, as well as, the debugging tools which gave errors a few times during testing. We send crash reports to resolve these issues.

Although my company is currently not in use of the Google App Engine in the Cloud, the feature surely enhances the capabilities of the program by creating the instant availability for any user in the company.

The Google App Engine provides great tools to a company looking for a simple yet powerful tool to enhance their application U/I or program. It provides enough assistance to resolve most major issues that may occur during the testing phase. Backed by Googles power-house support system, the program can satisfy the needs of the developers and users.

Not having to manage spinning up additional nodes for applications to optimize cost and performance has been a huge asset. There's a respectable amount of language support, but I would be interested to see that list expand over time

While not having to manage your systems under the hood is a huge asset, there's limitations to what technology and control you have. Logging has left pieces to be desired, and many internal errors do not have complete enough information to quickly resolve outages and downtime. Even with the most expedient of processes, having to open an external ticket to resolve time sensitive issues can be fatal.

Evaluate your use cases. Product is great for getting applications out quickly in an accessible format. Reduction of accessibility to developers may end up restricting developers in the long run.

Internal analytics, real time data tracking, collection and ingestion of external data sources. API services for retrieval of data.

Thats the first Google Cloud Platform Service that I used since 2010, I was a early beta user. I really like the fast and predictive response of Google AppEngine,

Maybe the first versions was language limited to Python and Java, but currently supports a dozen of languages like NodeJS, .NET Core, Ruby, etc

Well If you truly need power and elastic processing, don't think twice... Appengine is the truly elastic platform that securely fits your needs.

Truly linear costs

Truly QoS from 1 user to 1M users or more

Well I've implemented Mission Critical Applications that spike up in seconds from 100 users/second to 50,000-60,000 users per second, like presidential and congressional LATAM elections or cuasi-realtime tax paying balance calculations for every taxpayer in our country.

App Engine flex is very powerful in orchestrating some data pipelines and handling some regular ML jobs. It allows you to install custom packages and scale the application up and down. Since resources are managed by Google, we don't have to worry about the deployment and backend infrastructure, which allows us to focus on modeling work.

Since there are a lot of different use cases for App Engine flex, Google needs to do a better job in documentation. This helps users to know what is out there and make the connection in between App Engine and real business use cases. Also, its packages like gunicorn and pip3 is sometimes not up-to-date.

We handle a lot of our daily ML jobs in app engine, which is self contained and managed by Google. We also connect other GCP products using GAE, for example, Cloud ML, SQL, Big Query and Storage Bucket.

I have used google cloud once for my test project a java web app. It has a good integration with the source code editor was able to quickly get my project running hassle free .

I have used google cloud once for my test project a java web app. It has a good integration with the source code editor was able to quickly get my project running hassle free . I havent used much of this feature .But definitely want to use more and check what features it can provide compared against other providers.

Faster code implementation and deployment . Support all features and all kind of products

The management of servers so we don't have to is the primary reason we use App Engine. The ease of set up means you can launch a new webapp from scratch fairly quickly without the overhead of needing to understand anything about servers and setting up scaling groups. It also handles spikes in traffics for you which a big plus if you may have irregular traffic from sources. It's also linked to db/datastore services that are decent and easy to set up and link. The free quota is also great for testing an idea website without needing to spend much, if at all.

Google seems to have abandoned this project at some point but left it alive to dwindle on meaning, the any issues and bugs you find won't get fixed. Support help for it is minimal and not very helpful. Documentation is old and lacking. Costs can also add up if you start getting more and more traffic particularly with reads and writes. When the servers go down, which they do, there's nothing you can do but wait because it's all handled by App Engine.

There are newer technologies out there that you might want to research and explore with better support and features.

We use Google App Engine as the main host for our e-commerce website. It's great for handling the server up times and auto scaling.

Easy one spot stop for all the tools and storage that I need. I can sign on to multiple computers or even at home and retrieve the same information.

I dislike that docs and sheets doesn't always have as many specialized and fine tuning options especially when it comes to formatting.

From work to family to home to friends. Google Apps can connect all your needs. I enjoy sharing a calendar with my work and family to increase the ease of communication.

Shared files for ease of communication.

* First of all, Google's

* Stability and Scaling

* No Head Ache or person required to monitor site even on Heavy traffic.

* Speed and Suggestions

* Dashboards and renovated designs

* Multitasking and Memcache

* Documentation

* Datastore Query and Log System

* Sudden downtime and Task Queue Failures.

* Tickets raising & resolve - very slow and so many questions before checking details what we shared already.

* More Library and jars.

It's best to trust for E-Commerce Business or any type of businesses. The way we handle matters and impacts our business. I strongly recommend going with GAE and GWT for all type of businesses. Even we do have Mobile Platforms. GAE is the best ..... in all ways. After migrated from AWS to GAE (Since 2012), we feel a peace in our business and growth :)

* E-Commerce

* Giant E-Shop Site with Huge number of valuable customers

* Low Price with huge services

* GAE - Ease our business and genuinely helping us

* First of all, Google's

* Stability and Scaling

* No Head Ache or person required to monitor site even on Heavy traffic.

* Speed and Suggestions

* Dashboards and renovated designs

* Multitasking and Memcache

* Documentation

* Datastore Query and Log System

* Sudden downtime and Task Queue Failures.

* Tickets raising & resolve - very slow and so many questions before checking details what we shared already.

* More Library and jars.

* E-Commerce

* Giant E-Shop Site with Huge number of valuable customers

* Low Price with huge services

* GAE - Ease our business and genuinely helping us

Its easy to get started and you do not need to worry about it ever going down. I also love the versioning aspect.

App Engine Flex is far too expensive. The microservice approach is brilliant but it shouldn't cost my 4x than running all my services on a managed VM.

Do your pricing modeling first so you have realistic expectations

Moving my monolith to a microservice and breaking speciality apps into containers.

no datacenters, no networks, no servers, no vms, Infra As Code = IT nirvana

for new apps, created "in-house" this works very well BUT even today (8-April-2019) our organization still buys/deploys off-the-shelf products. these software manufacturers requests VMs... lame yes, but a reality.

the Newer you culture & applications are, the easier it is to adopt

SSO. E.g. G-Suite, Custom portal written in Java & PHP mainly

- Extremely low barrier to entry for a PaaS-like offering

- Low effort interoperation with Google Compute IaaS systems and services

- Hundreds of readily available service bindings available from Google and third parties

- Autoscaling (which can now be more finely tuned by an admin if desired)

- Easily customizable scaling options

- Integrates easily with Eclipse, InteliJ

- Well documented CLI's

- Admin console

- No ssh access / No systems level access (can be considered an acceptable limitation)

- Limited ability to manage VM and JVM specs/settings (this is getting better and better)

- No notion of file access (easy to work around but can be a little problematic if using third party code)

- Google-modified: JRE (which tends to lag quite a bit behind Oracle/OpenJDK), Log4J, and many others...

- Less portable application code due to modified libraries and proprietary access to services

Make sure to compare and contrast your PaaS/IaaS requirements with alternatives like Google Compute Engine, Amazon AWS, Pivotal CloudFoundary.

** DISCLAIMER ** I haven't used nor recommended GAE with my current nor any of my previous employers. My employer does use Google Compute Services for dev/test environments, but not GAE specifically.

While I've used Google App Engine quite a bit over the last seven years, I've used it exclusively as a tool for low risk projects - simple web apps, prototyping, and low risk micro-services used as stopgaps.

It's very easy to work with, and the ecosystem is growing rapidly. In the last few years in fact, it's improved immensely, is starting to become a real contender for larger and more critical projects.

It is very efficient, fast and cheap. GAE is a cool tool box that allow us to design amazing architecture that was almost impossible before.

I really like to use the GAE emulators, it allows the developer to use his machine to run and test the app in development.

It is very complex and has lots of tools and environments, there are a slow learning curve.. Each product is simple to use, but integrate them is not so easy and the products need a better documentation, examples and tutorials. The admin console is a little messy and hard to use.

GAE will change your life, it is simple (after you learn it), fast and cheap, but be careful, when you use the GAE, you will be tied with the Google for years, if you need to change your cloud provider, you will need to rewrite your system

I need to receive thousands of small messages per second from a mobile app, then I need to apply some security algorithms and consolidate the data.

Google's use of webapp2 makes it very easy to develop in Python. The console is great and the native GoogleAppLauncher tool and development server are very easy to use. Google provides good documentation for the platform.

App Engine is nicely integrated to Google Apps so we can run company domain email and other features.

Google changes the native libraries and deprecates features regularly. While the pricing is fair, it's sometimes hard to understand the exact usage breakdown.

We're so embedded in App Engine specifics it may become difficult to move to another services like AWS.

Google's support is very limited for a small company like us. We rely heavily on StackOverflow to handle our support.

Be prepared to learn a lot of App Engine specific knowledge like GQL Google Query Language and other things like their TaskQueue.

We built a web application using the App Engine that leverages the High Replication Datastore. The PaaS model is great for us to pay as we go without much server overhead for down periods.

I've been developing for and deploying to App Engine for 3 years now, developing a wide range of bespoke applications for clients in the Automative and Food industries. App Engine ecosystem is really comprehensive and works very well with Google APIs and third party RESTful services.

Here is what I like best about App Engine

Rapid Development:

The best about App Engine is the ability to rapidly develop an application and deploy it to production in no time.

No need for infrastructure/platform knowledge or setup:

There is no need for complex infrastructure/platform tuning and installation, simply develop locally and deploy.

Automatic scalability:

What I also like about it is the ability to autoscale your applications to deal with high demand using a simple Admin interface, you can also define deadlines for servicing requests.

Easy data persistence:

Data persistence is also straightforward with the NoSQL datastore, which is ideal for applications that are not transactional heavy, for applications that are transactional heavy it's easy to integrate with Cloud SQL (cloud MySQL).

A wide range of services:

App Engine also offers a wide range of services from identity management to integration with other Google APIs. Notably Cloud Endpoint is an easy to use API that enables the integration of Mobile applications, such that developers can easily develop an App Engine app as a Mobile backend.

Builtin security support:

App Engine has a very good support for Google Accounts, in particular when locking applications to a particular Google Application domain (enterprise or organisation). OAuth2 support works really well with the various Google APIs such as Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Calendar, Gmail, etc...

You need to know what is possible and what is not if coming from a Java background:

App Engine runs a customised Java virtual machine so some of the Java builtin functions are not available. For example file access, which means to manipulate or store files you need to use Cloud Storage rather than trying to process them on the server, but as soon as developers are acquainted with what is not possible, development becomes easy.

Heavyweight Java stack might not run:

Heavyweight Java stack might not run or be really slow. For example Spring Framework is really slow, whilst it's not possible to use Hibernate framework. You simply need to check if the library you want to use does play well with App Engine or not. But once you know what runs you can build a stack that works well. For example App Engine apps work really well with Google Guice for dependency injection (lightweight Spring replacement). Also Objectify library works really well as an Object Relational Mapping (ORM or strictly speaking Object to Entity mapping) to use with App Engine.

Tradeoff between response times and cost:

You need to spend time to tune your application to reach an optimal setup for both cost and response times, for example how many instances you are going to have idle waiting for requests. What instance types (CPU/RAM) you are going to use, and if they are sufficient or not.

Do your research and shortlist a technology stack that works well with App Engine.

Spend time tuning the performance parameters after deployment to reach a good balance between cost and performance.

Optimise your architecture using the services (task queues, etc...) provided to reduce the number of instance hours your app consumes.

If you set a daily budget limit ensure this is not going to impact the service availability.

Avoid trying to re-invent the wheel and write your own code, check the docs first, there might already be a service to achieve your goal.

The clients I've been developing for are not primarily technology companies, hence they don't have/don't want any infrastructure/platform overhead. App Engine cloud based PaaS (Platform as a Service) eliminates the need for any upfront investment on platforms or infrastructure. The ability to scale up and down based on demand also eliminates the need to spend on downsizing or upsizing.

For customers on Google Apps it's a no brainer to use App Engine for running enterprise applications which almost eliminates the cost of integration with mail, calendar and identity management backends. The RESTful service-oriented nature of App Engine also makes it really easy and cost effective to integrate with other enterprise systems.

- ease of getting simple web-based applications and products into production

- implementation using familiar high-level scripting languages - python in my case

- eliminates a lot of web-server infrastructure work: installing and maintaining machines, web servers, databases, load-balancing, high-availability, etc

- out of the box virtually unlimited scalability and reliability

- pricing structure convenient for wide ranges of activity loads, including a free tier

- highly evolving PaaS solution - constant flow of new features, improvements, fixes

- fairly responsive community-based support

- deployment of apps into private corporate clouds appears possible with Google-backed Appscale solution

- integration with other Google products is not always simple or even possible

- documentation for more complex usage often missing/outdated/misleading

- "freezing" the product is not possible, app updates are required when the implementation becomes incompatible with the evolution of the PaaS solution (generous deprecation deadlines are tipically available)

- for very heavy use pricing may skyrocket, hybrid architecture (including IaaS) may be needed, even switching entirely to other solution may become attractive

- switching to another solution may be quite costly in terms of re-design

- check closely the requirements and restrictions of the GAE sandboxing environment, some may be incompatible with your app

- be prepared to revisit and adjust your app's architecture - some of the GAE's restrictions may require it

- it might help if you don't have SQL expertise (or you're able to "forget" it) - IMHO it's more of a handicap in GAE context

- implementing the company's web site

- implementing several of the company's web-based products and services

I like not having to manage resources, specifically with App Engine flex. It reduces devops work and allows me to focus on writing code.

I think the process of debugging issues when trying to deploy an app is difficult. Stackdriver logs aren't always helpful, and sometimes in the console the error it throws lacks context.

Delivering real time recommendations to customers online.

scalable, can do code in java, owned by google

writing join queries is a pain which are often required in implementing business logic. some of the very basic requirements like knowing the row count in a table is another big pain as there is no way to run a select(*) type queries.

This ends up in writing a lot of boilerplate code and often error prone.

the building index thing also gets annoying sometimes.

i would definitely recommend it as its great in scalability. No matter how small you are and how big you aspire to be. Google app engine can take care of it.

Another great aspect is the company's brand reputation. You will not end up in wasting your entire investment just because company ran out of business etc.

On pricing being a non profit, the google was very generous to us and gave good rates.

we were building a non profit site with features like blood donor management for india

The simplicity of using the platform and managed scalability are standard now. I love the fact that my appengine application which I started 5 years ago is still running now.

The pace of new features into this product hasn't been impressive.

WebApp Hosting

GAE, and now Google Cloud Compute makes it really easy to get a cloud-based system up and running fast.

The support for multiple programming languages is great, and the documentation for what you can do in the framework is good.

Storing data in a NoSQL format can sometimes result in complexities during design, but the benefits of this data storage format allow for very quick queries, which can be quite useful, depending on your requirements.

GAE has a few general quirks, mostly to do with data storage (NoSQL-esque), and with timeouts on running tasks. This can quite heavily influence how you design a solution.

The admin interface can sometimes make it quite difficult to perform queries on your data, again this is partially due to how data is stored and organised. I can't help but feel that Google could do some work on this to improve user understanding as well as making the process of querying data easier.

I would strongly advise that if you are looking into using GAE, you should research it's limitations first as this may either affect your choice of platform, or the design you build!

I use GAE to aggregate music event data from multiple event APIs on a regular schedule. My GAE instance provides a REST API to present this data to an iPhone application.

For multiple years a periodic function has run in this environment. Across multiple major and minor version updates it hasn't missed a beat.

Some of the resourcing requirements and implications are a little opaque.

It has been set and forget. For a service with a simple database backend and remote web api access it has been solid and reliable.

And Google App Engine was part of that. The step by step tutorials are really useful, and there is pretty much anything one can do.\

Sometimes the errors and possible probelms weren't explained. Also it was sometimes hard to navigate the very similar docs for ie python 2 compared to python 3

I am doing a mail recipient reader web app, basically to read the address of people with ocr, and I had it working from my terminal, but wanted to make an app so that people can get it to work for themselves too

free, full contral, easy to setup, quick install

I can deploy my app fast and reward and rolling back as I want

Can't across the GFW. I must use vpn to acces it.

fast test our proto

free outside bridge