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.
It's one of the best serverless platforms we used so far. We created a small web application on it to use as ATS and also set up an email server which worked very well with good performance and minimal administration. Their support team is superb as they addressed our queries so effectively and fast. It's also very good in terms of integration with other applications and existing infrastructure.
Pros
Email servers are good with email delivery in inbox.
It enables uploading data to web applications.
We're able to manage multiple applications with a single dashboard which has a great UI.
Cons
Some more documentation and tutorials would help a lot.
I would like to see integration with more open source applications.
I would like more options to choose different UI themes.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google App Engine is a great platform to cater to the needs of different size organizations from small businesses to enterprise levels. Due to its great support and the large community, it can be deployed with minimum administration. It is also a great choice for businesses requiring an extra level of security.
We're using Google App Engine to build and host our web application and backend across the organization. This helps us in building a highly scalable applications on a fully managed server-less platform.
Pros
It's very simple to integrate in the application.
Provides deployment history, so that you can switch back to any instance.
Fully scalable, so that you can add power as needed.
Cons
They can improve on their documentation.
Navigation can be made more simple.
Pricing can be reduced.
Likelihood to Recommend
The fact that it is very easy to understand for a person who is making his/her first step into cloud technology. Auto scalable and managed totally by Google is also a great feature for a small team or a prototype application. So, if you want to get a system up and running quickly then this can be really handy.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)
We deployed Moodle(LMS) and Odoo(ERP) applications on Google App Engine using Marketplace available configurations from Bitmani. We are using App Engine to host such client applications. The Google Marketplace saved us many hours of trying to configure these large applications ourselves.
Pros
Google's Marketplace is a great resource. I did not find this on other cloud services.
Google's billing system is easy and straightforward to understand.
Google's project based management of resources is good.
Cons
Google dashboard is not so helpful. It does not give a summary of the resource like in AWS.
Google console should have something like "Recently visited services" of AWS.
It is hard to install Google Cloud SDK.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google App Engine is great for Kubernetes, since it's very stable and new releases come quickly. Google Marketplace saved a lot of time if standard open sources applications like Moodle has to be deployed and tested quickly. Google App Engine is not good for beginners in cloud hosting, since it's hard to configure.
[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
Google App Engine is used in the IT department to host the organization's website, manage the scaling as well as ongoing maintenance and updates, and to build the web application in PHP and Python, serverless, without the inhouse management of the website's underlying infrastructure and platform.
Pros
Google App Engine APIs to build and deploy the web app was straightforward and very easy.
Since Google App Engine is fully managed and serverless, the web app auto scales up and down based on the workload.
Cons
Google App Engine is expensive in the long run and cost adds up pretty quickly.
Since it is fully managed and serverless, you have no access to underlying infrastructure and OS that may be needed for some fine tuned and complex web apps.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a great 'startup' web application platform where you are looking at building a not to complex website that is fully managed without much internal IT staff. It is less appropriate when the web application is complex and you expect large database query sizes/index or workloads that needs a lot of compute, memory and network resources since it is expensive, being fully management and serverless.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (Airlines/Aviation company, 51-200 employees)
Google App Engine is in use for nearly every internal system and tool that we have developed, as well as a large amount of systems and tools that we have developed for our customers. It is used by our development team to build integrations between systems, build web pages, build cron jobs and automation workflows, and really anything else we need.
Our internal IT team uses it to deploy other systems like a Grab and Go program for Chromebooks (open sourced) and time approval mechanisms.
Pros
Extremely low cost option for web page deployment. It so simple to prototype or even offer a service by using your favourite app servering platform like Django, Flask, etc.
Incredible scaling. App Engine scales up and down with ease, automatically, and never fails to serve your app.
Ease of deployment. Google documentation is clear and concise, plus it's extremely extensible. It's easy to learn how to do this!
Cons
Support. It's not frequent at all that we reach out with support questions, but it is sometimes hard to get answers.
Roadmap visibility. Transitions and deprecations are hard to track and therefore may be hard to plan for!
Likelihood to Recommend
App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect.
If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like Google Compute Engine or another managed service.
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.
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.
Use is based on client or project needs. It is used mainly as a cloud based API service so that corporate enterprise systems can leverage it internally or with other service dependent applications.
Pros
Cloud based RESTful APIs
Access to big data resources for reporting and analytics
Custom Cloud web hosted applications
Cost, speed, ease of adoption
Implemented a custom company based web site using Vosao on GAE CMS
Cons
Administration and management - more Azure like portal
Better reporting on forecasted and actual usage via notifications.
Better documentation, examples. More use case centric documentation.
Likelihood to Recommend
Learning curve is relatively short.
Integration to Eclipse is awesome.
Integration with standard frameworks is getting better - I would not recommend loading entire spring framework on it, but aspects of it are more useful.
App Engine allows organizations to leverage the Google Apps APIs and get easy access to some functionality that is not available the standard Google Apps users. For example, the ability to maintain your user's meta data, such as their business title, department, work address, work phone number, cell phone number etc. These are not available in the Google Apps Control Panel, but with some coding on Google App Engine, you can create the interface that allows users to self-manage their own meta data. This just one example of leveraging Google App Engine to complement a Google Apps rollout.
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.
Cons
There is a slight learning curve to getting used to code on Google App Engine.
Google Cloud Datastore is Google's NoSQL database in the cloud that your applications can use. NoSQL databases, by design, cannot give handle complex queries on the data. This means that sometimes you need to think carefully about your data structures - so that you can get the results you need in your code.
Setting up billing is a little annoying. It does not seem to save billing information to your account so you can re-use the same information across different Cloud projects. Each project requires you to re-enter all your billing information (if required)
Likelihood to Recommend
App Engine is well suited for most web applications, especially when you are unsure about the amount of traffic you are expecting to have. Knowing that App Engine will scale up and down automatically gives you a peace of mind that your application will not crash if demand suddenly increases! And you don't need to worry about paying for a high end solution with redundancy and load balancing built in - as App Engine handles all of that - and you only pay for the resources you actually use.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Research & Development (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)