TrustRadius Insights for Google App Engine are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Efficient Email Servers: Users have praised the email servers for their efficiency in delivering messages promptly, ensuring reliable communication.
Easy Data Upload: Many users find the ability to upload data to web applications effortlessly as a valuable feature that enhances their overall user experience.
Automatic Scaling of Apps: The automatic scaling of apps based on user demand is highlighted by users as a beneficial feature that ensures smooth performance even with increasing usage.
Various Programming Language Support: Users appreciate the platform's support for programming languages like Java, Python, Php, and Ruby, which facilitates development and adds flexibility.
Straightforward Billing System: The straightforward and easy-to-understand billing system provided by Google is appreciated by users for simplifying financial management within the platform.
Project-Based Resource Management: The project-based management of resources by Google is seen as a beneficial feature that contributes to efficient resource allocation and utilization.
Flexibility in Scaling Instances: Users value the ability to scale instances up or down based on business needs, allowing effective demand response while optimizing costs.
Managing Server-less Resources Efficiently: The ease of managing server-less resources and deploying applications efficiently is highlighted as a key strength of the platform.
Cost-Effective Solution for Small Applications: Google App Engine is recognized as a cost-effective and time-saving alternative for running small applications, enabling quick implementation.
[Google App Engine] was used by one department for serving various backend APIs. Its portability and scalability were the main reasons we used it. The app-engine manageability was totally on Google
Pros
Fully Managed by Google
Completely auto-scalable
Easy to deploy and monitor
Cons
We need to be careful while deployment, there are some drops of requests
Time in deployment is slightly high
Exceptions during deployment
Likelihood to Recommend
If we have lightweight APIs with simple database interactions then app-engine is best suitable. No manageability, just write code and deploy
We use Google App Engine to house many of our mission-critical web applications with zero downtime. It solves the need to have 100% uptime with no added long term equipment costs and additional IT support staff.
Pros
Ease to deploy.
Flexible ability to scale to meet increases in users.
Ability to program in various languages allowing for different development teams to work with it.
Cons
The ability to only run web applications. If it could also run self-executing non-web based applications it could be used more heavily.
It only allows the use of the Google Cloud store which limits the ability to use other cloud stores already in use in the enterprise.
It's a closed API that can lock into being dependent entirely on Google. There are many open-source projects ongoing that can help to alleviate.
Likelihood to Recommend
If there is a need to deploy a web application on new equipment without purchasing hardware and requiring additional IT support, then App Engine will fit the need. The pricing is low and can be scaled to meet the needs.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Information Technology and Services company, 1001-5000 employees)
I use Google App Engine to program in Python for data collection and data mining. This is solely being used for engineering and development. It solves the issue of having to manage your own server and allows your apps to be accessed from anywhere there is a computer and internet access. This makes it convenient for sharing between coworkers.
Pros
Coding environment
Create test environments
Have a history of all builds
Cons
Not free
Likelihood to Recommend
This PaaS is great because you can access your programs and builds anywhere with a computer and internet connection. It's relatively cheap and easy to use. It supports everything I needed so far.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Medical Devices company, 1-10 employees)
App Engine is a fantastic service for developers who want to be able to run their code in an environment that they do not have to provision -- there is no manual server configuration or maintenance, etc, and all the developer needs to be concerned about is how their code works.
Pros
Removes the need for manual server configuration, management, orchestration, etc
Interfaces incredibly well with other GCP services, like Cloud Functions and Firebase
Cons
It is not the most cost-efficient hosting provider and could continue to improve from a cost basis
Google's UI can be confusing for newcomers when managing an App Engine deployment
Likelihood to Recommend
App Engine is well suited to customers who want to use Google Cloud as their primary cloud service and is similar in role to Elastic Beanstalk from AWS and App Service from Azure. It's particularly suited to developers with standard needs (e.g. nothing so sophisticated that manual server management would be necessary) who value the simplicity over deeper customizability.
We developed and deployed a basic app via Google App Engine in order to evaluate their serverless architecture. Development and deployment were mostly pain free, and we were able to quickly go live with a scalable solution where we didn't have to worry about infrastructure, using the language of our choice (many are supported).
Pros
Supports all popular languages (and you can even bring your own language runtime)
Built-in automatic scaling is great
Cons
Lags behind competing platforms (Azure, AWS) in terms of features
Less documentation, examples, etc. as compared to competitors' platforms
Likelihood to Recommend
I would say that Google App Engine is worth a look, however it doesn't seem to be as full-featured or popular as competing platforms such as AWS and Azure. It also feels a little dated in general. That said, it's still a solid platform and we were able to get live and running with little trouble.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Health, Wellness and Fitness company, 1-10 employees)
Missing scheduler as a service. Has static cron, but no fault-tolerant, dynamic scheduling as a service. Azure has this.
Documentation. Documentation can be stale, to terse, cumbersome to navigate.
Deploy time and CI. Azure has Git hooks and auto update built in. So from commit to live can be under one minute. GCP more manual, and closer to 5+ min for same.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited: Prototype. Test. App scale. Small team.
Less well suited. When higher (more granular) level of control is needed, AWS is still superior.
We use Google App Engine for content distribution of digital publishing assets as well as analytics and authentication services for a wide array of platforms. The whole organization uses Google App Engine in some capacity or another. The business problems it addresses are virtualizing services and abstracting away server configuration, load balancing, software updates and everything else we would have to do to set up the same infrastructure on a classic web server stack. Google App Engine has expedited our development and deployment processes tremendously so we can continue innovating with new services, getting them up and running quickly, while trusting that our existing services are running on a rock solid cloud platform backend.
Pros
Quick to develop, quick to deploy. You can be up and running on Google App Engine in no time.
Flexible. We use Java for some services and Node.js for others.
Great security features. We have been consistently impressed with the security and authentication features of Google App Engine.
Cons
Documentation does not always keep up with the latest changes to the service. Google App Engine has undergone a lot of changes these past couple of years. At times, we were surprised to find out that something we didn't think was possible was, or, conversely, something that was supposed to work fine which had been deprecated. We also ended up using some undocumented features and weren't sure whether they would keep working or not.
Price. Google App Engine isn't cheap. But, you get what you pay for. Rock solid service, great tools, at a hefty price.
Difficult to tell how to optimize costs. We racked up the expenses and it is still a mystery where all the costs are being incurred.
Some intimidating or arcane aspects of configuration. Most of it was a breeze but every now and then something would be pretty far out and require a few of us developers putting our heads together to figure it out.
Sometimes required reading source code to figure out how to do something. Not a ton of examples of how to do various things, nor Stack Overflow posts, at least in the beginning. I imagine this will change as the community grows. But sometimes it felt like we were all alone trying to figure out how to do things.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google App Engine is great if you want to rapidly build and deploy web services and you have the money to spend. It's also great if you have a team of developers, or at least 2 or 3, so if you get stuck then you have multiple people looking into it and trying to figure out how to proceed. It is less well-suited to a small startup looking to save cash, or to an individual developer who may get stuck on something and be totally blocked for days or weeks.
It serves all our traffic to end users, which is basically one of the most important things for our organization.
Pros
Serving traffic to end users. It can scale automatically when traffic spikes.
The standard environment has some limitations, but it encourages you to write "scalable" code.
With Flexible Environment, you can serve any Docker container you want, still taking advantage of auto scaling.
Easy integration with other Google Cloud products, e.g. Datastore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, etc.
Cons
Flexible environment needs scaling to zero and support for all APIs available in Standard Environment like ndb for Python and Task Queue.
Standard Environment needs to update some outdated libraries like lxml for Python.
Instance pricing of Standard Environment could be lowered, since it wasn't updated for many years.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's a good use case to use App Engine when you need to serve traffic to large amount of users, but you should avoid doing any computation on it. It's better to use Compute Engine or Dataflow to process your data. It has a free tier so it's very useful for non-yet-existing startups.
I use it for in house education application. We implemented it with Django. It controls our education management system. We use Django and Google F1 database. Sometimes we have problems with sending emails and reaching quota. The control panel do not reach the quota but we can send email. After that we aware that controls update information very slow. Except for sending email everything works very good.
Pros
On demand quota change.
Django.
Almost good admin control panel.
Flexibility.
Cons
They should provide more examples for developers.
They should decrease their prices.
They should improve the quota notification system.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google App Engine is well suited If you want to use simple deployment for your Django application and if you want to change to an old version of your application when you get a fail on your application without any extra effort. This is really good scenario for developers. You don't need any system engineers to control your application. I like that.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Information Services company, 11-50 employees)
Google App Engine is used for hosting an application by one of the teams in our department. The application is responsible for handling file storage and access levels for two major components that are owned by two different teams. Google Cloud Storage is used for hosting these files.
Pros
Google App Engine offers the platform to develop an end to end application without the need of having any other software installed.
Google App Engine allows rapid deployment of applications and immediate availability of the code deployed in the cloud.
Google App Engine offers services that allow you to quickly prototype any application and have it deployed at a minimal cost. The console allows you to view and manage the status of your application so that everything can be done from a developer perspective without the involvement of the Ops team.
Cons
I feel that the restrictions regarding no threads, no writing of files to the disk and so on, are great for keeping things secure however they can be real blockers sometimes and make it very difficult to find workarounds for problems that you are trying to solve while developing your application.
The 12 simultaneous connections limit to the database instance from an instance cannot be increased, so the available performance options can sometimes be not enough for heavy load apps.
The customer service is always responsive when we open support tickets however there isn't an offering for assistance on site if needed or consultations regarding best practices.
Likelihood to Recommend
A scenario where Google App Engine is well suited is when you want to develop a quick prototype and you don't have servers as an infrastructure option and you just need to have something running quick. Also make sure the app doesn't need to create new threads, write to the file system, or use Java classes outside of the JRE class whitelist.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (Business Supplies and Equipment company, 10,001+ employees)
