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Amazon EC2 vs Google App Engine comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Amazon EC2 delivers cost savings and efficiency, enhancing innovation and agility despite higher costs than on-premise solutions.
Sentiment score
4.9
Google App Engine reduces costs and enhances value, but effectiveness varies, relying on user understanding and optimal resource use.
This cost factor has an impact on the project, giving us more possibilities to configure other services and greater financial freedom.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
I would say I have saved more than a week with Amazon EC2 compared to my previous on-premises setup.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Once we deployed this same application as part of Google App Engine, the cost drastically reduced to just $120 for the small instance we use for our development.
Enterprise Cloud Architect at Johnson & Johnson Medtech
Operationally, it was efficient for us because we could easily spin up new versions to demonstrate new functionality without modifying the original environment.
Senior Software Engineer at Cimpress
Google App Engine offers discounts for high resource utilization, similar to committed use discounts for Compute Engine.
Associate Projects at Cognizant
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EC2 support is generally effective, though premium support excels, with some challenges in technical integration and communication.
Sentiment score
5.8
Google App Engine offers inconsistent support quality, with experiences varying by customer relationship, package level, and support needs.
I would rate technical support from Amazon a 10, as we have on-prem AWS experts.
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the AWS support team a seven.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
Amazon's customer support is much better than other clouds.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
They route us toward the appropriate team handling Google App Engine or other services, so when there is an issue, the respective team connects and provides support.
Enterprise Cloud Architect at Johnson & Johnson Medtech
The technical support was very quick and responsive, with a direct team line available.
Google invests in companies with technical expertise, offering connections to enterprise clients and technical support for their products.
Senior Regional Sales Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EC2 is highly praised for its scalability and autoscaling features, contributing to cost efficiency and reliability.
Sentiment score
6.3
Google App Engine scales well with automatic features, though flexible instance deployment and handling intensive requests require improvement.
Google App Engine scales well in the standard environment, which automatically handles traffic without manual scaling.
Software Engineer (DevOps)
Google App Engine is highly scalable and can integrate easily with other applications.
Technical Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
With automatic scaling, Google Cloud handles the scaling process, which leads to my high rating.
Senior Engineer at Brillio
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 is highly stable, with minimal downtime and issues usually caused by specific use cases or misconfigurations.
Sentiment score
6.9
Google App Engine is highly stable, with minimal disruptions and quick issue resolution, praised for low maintenance requirements.
It is somewhat more reliable compared to Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
Amazon EC2 is stable and more economical.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
I have not experienced any crashing or instability with Google App Engine.
Software Engineer (DevOps)
However, large code bases can still cause it to slow down.
Technical Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the stability of Google App Engine a perfect 10 out of 10, as it is completely managed by Google.
Senior Engineer at Brillio
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EC2 users seek cost reduction, improved documentation, better UI, seamless integrations, scalability, and more user-friendly tools.
Google App Engine faces pricing, support, and scalability challenges, with limited language support, database options, and migration complexities.
I have heard from multiple people that if you have an Amazon EC2 instance running and you stop it, the billing continues unless you terminate the Amazon EC2 instance.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I think improvements can be made to Amazon EC2 by increasing the memory, offering more instance types, and including GPUs as mentioned in the keynote.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
There was not proper documentation on how to install the patch managers and automate patching with System Managers.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
It would be beneficial if Flex services could scale down to zero instances during periods of no traffic.
Senior Software Engineer at Cimpress
The pricing is higher compared to alternatives like Kubernetes and Compute Engine.
In the Flex environment, SSH access is not available for private instances.
Software Engineer (DevOps)
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 offers flexible, scalable pricing with potential savings, though cost management requires strategic planning to address complexities.
Google App Engine provides competitive pay-as-you-go pricing, affordable for light usage but higher for robust applications.
The licensing fees for Amazon EC2 are affordable, especially for lower tiers where there are fewer requirements or where the load is very low for product development.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
I found it very cheap and a fair price according to what we need.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
For F1 usage with 256 MB, it is free.
I've never heard anyone express that the licenses are too expensive.
Senior Regional Sales Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
My GCP billing is about 10 lakh INR per month, and Google App Engine contributes only 25,000 to 30,000 INR.
Software Engineer (DevOps)
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 provides scalable, flexible, cost-effective cloud resources with seamless AWS integration, security, and tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
Google App Engine offers users scalability, reliability, and integration, focusing on development and reducing infrastructure management efforts.
With the cloud, deployment is easy, and within a minute, we can deploy the server and give it to the developers so they can work on it right away after deployment.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The main benefits Amazon EC2 provides for me as an end user are cost savings, as they are more OpEx costs rather than CapEx for us.
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Amazon EC2 offers flexibility.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution offers scalability, autoscaling based on user demand, and security, as Google manages all updates and security patches.
I also appreciate the Google App Engine standard environment because it handles traffic scaling without manual intervention.
Software Engineer (DevOps)
Deploying code is straightforward without worrying about deployment or integration.
Technical Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Compute Service (2nd)
Google App Engine
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon EC2 is designed for Compute Service and holds a mindshare of 14.9%, up 8.4% compared to last year.
Google App Engine, on the other hand, focuses on PaaS Clouds, holds 2.2% mindshare, up 2.1% since last year.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon EC214.9%
AWS Lambda14.7%
AWS Fargate9.5%
Other60.9%
Compute Service
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Google App Engine2.2%
Amazon AWS13.7%
Microsoft Azure12.0%
Other72.1%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2879559 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Flexible virtual machines have accelerated data experimentation and reduced project costs
The best features that Amazon EC2 offers are the availability and the freedom to work with whatever I want. I can configure simpler machines to conduct quicker tests, or I can configure more robust machines according to what the project needs, including machines with a visual operating system. Regarding this flexibility, it impacts my day-to-day work and the projects I develop in terms of speed. If I want to test a project that has JavaScript with Angular and Node.js and I need to install MongoDB, I can configure a machine quickly, tailored for that, and get the data via API from somewhere. If I had to do this on my company machine, I would have to open a ticket with IT and explain the project. Something I could do in one day through my own processes would take two weeks through the company's procedures. Amazon EC2 has had a positive impact on my organization because its configuration offers more options than other clouds. Especially in the IoT area, we prefer to use AWS rather than Microsoft because of the robustness and security, whether in a gateway that we configure, in a firewall, or elsewhere. We adapted better to Amazon EC2.
RK
Senior Engineer at Brillio
Have managed resources seamlessly thanks to robust platform capabilities
The areas of Google App Engine that I would to improve or enhance include its allowance for complete end-to-end deployment and scalability; however, it is manageable only for a few languages. For instance, it doesn't support languages C and C++, only basic support for Node.js, Java, and Ruby. It's not a comprehensive solution for all scenarios. Moreover, the security feature is based on IAM roles, but it should ideally be based on Active Directory (AD) roles. For IAM-based roles, we need to add the proper users and provide all security permissions manually. In an AD-based model, we would simply add users to a specific group, and all permissions would be inherited.
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was fine. I found it very cheap and a fair price according to what we need.
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
I cannot think of a way for Amazon EC2 to be improved.
What is your primary use case for Amazon EC2?
I have been working as a data engineer for four years now. In my first year, I worked at a logistics company where I focused exclusively on data. At Energisa, I work in the innovation area, where I...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google App Engine?
I believe it is reasonably priced. I've never heard anyone express that the licenses are too expensive.
What needs improvement with Google App Engine?
The error logging system in Google App Engine could be enhanced. While there are troubleshooting documents with Google-defined error logs, identifying the exact root cause can be challenging. Often...
What is your primary use case for Google App Engine?
My primary use case for Google App Engine is within the finance industry, dealing with enterprise-scale businesses.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
GAE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Khan Academy, Best Buy, Gigya, MetOffice, Getaround, Mimiboard, NewsLimited, WebFilings, and CloudLock.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache, Zadara and others in Compute Service. Updated: August 2026.
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