Name: Google App Engine
Brand: Google
Rating: 4.1 (36 reviews)

Developer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 4, 2013

One of the first PaaS solutions around and still one of the best

One of the first PaaS solutions around and still one of the best, Google App Engine is a solid choice to launch your next app idea. You can deploy Java, Python or Go based web apps and enjoy a variety of free and low-cost add-ons.

If you want a mostly-static website with some dynamic content, strongly consider the webapp2 framework. It is light-weight and easy to learn. With just a few lines of Python code, you can deploy an app that can serve a website, provide database backed storage, send emails and make HTTP requests. If you want to go enterprise, it is rare to find a Spring compatible hosting service for cheap, let alone free, but here it is.

One thing that App Engine can do better than any other free service is send emails. If your app needs to send emails, I would strongly consider App Engine. As if that is not enough, your app can actually receive e-mails as well. You can also send and receive instant messages using the XMPP protocol. If your users likely have a Google account, you can authenticate them and consume other Google APIs with ease.

If your website gets incredibly busy you have the option to scale up the performance of your website and pay a small fee. For example, a single massive burst to your site may cost you $0.50 – $1.00. A constantly busy site will cost you more. You have complete control of the billing and can set quotas and alerts. Unlike the other PaaS services, pricing ramps up gradually as your traffic increases.

If your website is not very busy then there is a down-side: Your website may pause for a couple seconds the first time someone accessess a page after it has been idle for some time. In the grand scheme, this is a very minor point, but it is present. Also, signing up for App Engine requires you to authenticate your identity by receiving a text message. Once confirmed, you can deploy a website in about 30 minutes.

Pros: three languages, database support, excellent email sending, Google integration
Cons: Performance can be poor on idle websites, signup requires a text message

Checkout the 5 minute tutorial or sign up.

While Google’s App Engine has a more linear price curve as your app grows in popularity, I have to give creds to Heroku for making pricing simple and clear.

Which to choose?

If you want a static website that showcases your open source involvement, use Github pages.
If you need a static website with geographic diversity and you don’t mind paying a very low amount, or if you need to host large amounts of data (like Videos or file downloads) use Amazon’s S3 service
If you want to host with PHP or you want a very generous PaaS solution and can tollerate unclear vendor support, use Openshift
If you want Ruby on Rails support use Heroku
If you are OK with Python support and/or you need excellent e-mail sending capability use App Engine
If you just don’t know what you want then use App Engine and see if it meets your needs. If it doesn’t, by then you’ll know what you do want and can pick the right tool.

Read the full post on my blog.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Jun 9, 2014

You are right, I can deploy Java, Python or Go based web applications. Related to this topic, do you know which JVM languages I can use in my App Engine application?

it_user3636

Principal Consultant/VP of Technology

Jan 11, 2013

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Easy to upload from IDE. ...

Pros and Cons

"Easy to upload from IDE."

"Need a better documentation and tech support."

Valuable Features:

Easy to upload from IDE.

Room for Improvement:

Need a better documentation and tech support.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user1158

Developer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jul 18, 2012

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Overall a good and cheap platform with scalability support. Good for individuals and startups, but not suitable for heavy/large applications.

Pros and Cons

"Google takes care of deploying the code to the clusters, monitoring, failover, and launching application instances as and when necessary."

"Once you think of migrating out of the AppEngine world, you'll face a lot of problems."

Valuable Features:

- A very good platform for those applications that store something and retrieve it back. - Google takes care of deploying the code to the clusters, monitoring, failover, and launching application instances as and when necessary. This takes a lot of the administrative work off the user. - Easy and cheaper (in the short term) - Unlimited scalabity to your application, and scales with demand. - GAE supports MySQL db as well. - App Engine doesn't provide you with the flexibility to use an equivalent service if you need to pick something else for your app.

Room for Improvement:

- Developers have read-only access to the filesystem on the Google App Engine. - GAE is not suitable for CPU intensive calculations. - You cannot produce a social graph using Google app engine. - Once you think of migrating out of the AppEngine world, you'll face a lot of problems. For example, having to change your code to use your own datastore, task queues, and other services. If your application is fairly large, this will be a very difficult process. - Since the backend is completely manage by Google, you don't have control over the environment your application runs in. - Apart from the free space and to build some "Hobby" websites, Google App Engine is not the place java guys should look in as Java is quite heavy on memory front.

Other Advice:

Overall a good platform for running small applications that basically deals with storing and retrieving data from backend. Since the backend is handled by Google, you get a scalable app platform, but at the cost of losing control over the backend environment. You cannot tweak the backend and you just have to leave with whatever Google has to offer.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Jun 23, 2013

There are a number of reasons that make GAE a good choice including automatic scaling, easy to code and setup configuration files and a pre-configured architecture that makes application development easier.

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it_user981

Manager of Development at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jun 25, 2012

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A good application hosting option for short term, low budget startups

Pros and Cons

"Zero maintenance cost for web servers"

"More expensive than the alternate options if a product/service has a lot of users."

Valuable Features:

Zero maintenance cost for web servers Reliable for scalability Free basic account with limited quota for trial Suitable for startups with limited users and limited resources

Room for Improvement:

No filesystem access More expensive than the alternate options if a product/service has a lot of users Language support limited to Java and Python Database options limited to MySQL and Google data store

Other Advice:

I have been using it for a startup for over an year. Initially it was great, but with an expanding user base, it makes more sense to host my own servers.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user82776Chief Executive Officer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Feb 12, 2014

I think having 5 developers working with you to allow for patching upgrade and zeroing down on scalability, and yes having your own server will help the effects of over expanding customer base. Like the Khan Academy did.

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