Google App Engine vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google App Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Features
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine
8.7
Ratings
9% above category average
Microsoft Azure
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
8.5
Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.
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Actually, migrating to Microsoft Azure is a good solution for almost any situation, especially when all components of your network are ready to become cloud-based. The only drawback I personally encounter frequently is that older software packages cannot always be easily picked up and moved to Microsoft Azure in an optimal manner.
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Pros
  • Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
  • Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
  • Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.
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  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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Cons
  • For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
  • For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
  • The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.
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  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
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We have been very satisfied with Windows Azure and now a lot of our business depends on it as more teams are now deploying their applications into Azure. Our next step is to have our Infrastructure team move their resources to Azure. It will take awhile for that to happen but we are positive that it will.
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Usability
Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
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Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Support Rating
Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
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Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Alternatives Considered
App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.
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I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in my opinion. This made it the natural choice for most, especially if heavily invested in Windows, Office 365, or Active Directory deployments. We chose Azure over GCP because we simply needed Windows workload support as a strong driver, more access to global regions, and let's not forget that most tech teams in an organization are Microsoft Certified, which makes skillset transfer from on-prem to cloud a minimal learning curve over shifting to a different provider.
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Return on Investment
  • App Engine can scale basically infinitely so our users can always expect fast responsiveness.
  • App Engine has saved us money by only using the resources we need when we need them.
  • The security and IAM policies surrounding App Engine have saved a lot of head aches.
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  • Times and growth went into it. By balancing on-premises maintenance with continuous cloud improvements, we’ve budgeted and planned endlessly increased capacity.
  • In today’s world of cyber-crime, clients can put even more faith in what they’ve heard. We built an innovative single-sign-on hub for all users. Also, other business platforms use Azure application gateways, reducing worker switching time and increasing productivity.
  • Its step can automate to improve the investment. In addition, we can integrate our organization’s credentials into an authorization for other systems.
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