App Engine

The App Engine is Google’s Platform as a Service(PaaS) offering. It is a compute service that provides a managed platform for running applications. As this is a managed service, your focus should be on the application only and  Google will manage the resources needed to run the application. Thus App Engine users have less to manage, but you will have less control over the compute resources. The applications hosted on App Engine are highly scalable and run reliably even under heavy load. 

The App Engine supports the following languages:

• Python
• Go
• Ruby
• PHP
• Node.js
• Java
• .NET

The App Engine provides two types of runtime environments: standard and flexible.

1. The Standard environment provides a secured and sandboxed environment for running applications and distributes requests across multiple servers to meet the demand. The applications run independently of the hardware, OS, and physical location of the server.
2. The Flexible environment provides more options and control to the developers who want to use App Engine, but without the language constraints of the standard environment. It uses Docker containers as the basic building blocks. These containers can be auto-scaled according to load.

Pros of App Engine:

• You need to focus only on the application code, the rest of everything is managed by Google. Thus reducing management complexities.
• As it provides version management, thus it is easy to maintain and roll out versions of applications.
• It has faster autoscaling as the size of instances is smaller.
• Easy to deploy and monitor.

Cons of App Engine: 

• It is more constrained as the instances are smaller, thus enabling fast autoscaling, but there can be cases when large applications require larger instances.
• As it is a fully managed service, the user has no control over the underlying infrastructure that may be required for some complex applications.
• It is expensive in the long run as the cost adds up quickly.

Google Cloud Platform provides a wide range of computing services that target broad categories of user needs. 

The Google Cloud Platform provides mainly 6 types of compute options: –

1. App Engine
2. Compute Engine
3. Kubernetes Engine
4. Cloud Functions
5. Cloud Run
6. VMware Engine

Now let’s talk about some of these services in brief.