Google App Engine is an industry-leading Platform as a Service (PaaS) from the company that pioneered much of the microservices technology we rely on today.
In this blog, we are going to cover Google App Engine, its features, advantages, and use-cases.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a fully managed serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications at a scale. Users can choose from several popular languages, libraries, and frameworks to develop their applications and then App Engine takes care of provisioning servers and scaling app instances based on demand. It is a PaaS for building scalable applications.
It is one of the Compute services offered by Google Cloud Platform. To know more about other services offered by Google Cloud Platform read the blog Google Cloud Services And Tools
Note: Read our Blog Post on Google Cloud Functions.
Google App Engine Environments
Google Cloud provides 2 environments to use App Engine, one is a standard environment with constrained environments and support for languages such as Python, Go, node.js. The other one is the Flexible Environment where developers have more freedom such as running custom runtimes using docker, longer request & response timeout, and ability to install custom dependencies/software, and SSH into the virtual machine.
1.) Standard Environment
It is based on the container which runs on the Google infrastructure. It provides users with the facility to easily build and deploy an application that runs under heavy load and a large amount of data. It supports the following languages: Python, JAVA, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, and Go.
Features of Standard Environment:
- Persistent storage with queries, sorting, and transactions.
- Automatic scaling and load balancing.
- Asynchronous task queues for performing work outside the scope of a request.
- Scheduled tasks for triggering events at regular intervals or specific time intervals.
- Integration with other Google cloud services and APIs.
2.) Flexible Environment
App Engine Flexible Environment allows users to concentrate on writing code. Based on Google Compute Engine, it automatically scales the app up and down and along with it also balances the load. It allows users to customize their runtime and the operating system of their virtual machines using Dockerfiles.
Features of Flexible Environment:
- Infrastructure Customization: App Engine flexible environment instances are Compute Engine virtual machines, which implies that users can take advantage of custom libraries, use SSH for debugging, and deploy their own Docker containers.
- It is an open-source community.
- Native feature support: Features such as microservices, authorization, SQL and NoSQL databases, traffic splitting, logging, etc are natively supported.
- Performance: Users can take advantage of a wide array of CPU and memory configurations.
Note: Read Our Blog Post on Associate Cloud Engineer.
Google App Engine Use-Cases
1.) Scalable Mobile Backends: App Engine automatically scales the hosting environment for users who are building their first mobile application or looking to reach out to existing users via a mobile experience. It offers seamless integration with Firebase which provides an easy-to-use frontend mobile platform along with a scalable and reliable back end.
2.) Modern Web-Applications: Quickly reach customers and end-users by deploying web apps on App Engine. With zero-config deployments and zero server management, It allows users to focus on just writing code. In addition to this, it automatically scales to support sudden traffic spikes without provisioning, patching, or monitoring.
Benefits of Google App Engine
The main benefits of Google App Engine are:
- Open and familiar languages and tools: Users can build and deploy apps quickly using popular languages or bring their own language runtimes and frameworks, they can also manage resources from the command line, debug source code, and run API back ends easily.
- Just add code: App Engine protects from security threats using firewall capabilities, IAM rules, and managed SSL/ TLS certificates so that it helps users to write code without any underlying infrastructure.
- Pay only for what you use: It naturally scales relying upon the application traffic and expends resources just when the code is running.
Features of App Engine
Some of the prominent features of Google App Engine include:
- Popular language: Users can build the application using language runtimes such as Java, Python, C#, Ruby, PHP or build their own runtimes.
- Open and flexible: Custom runtimes allow users to bring any library and framework to App Engine by supplying a Docker container.
- Fully managed: It allows users to add your web application code to the platform while it manages the infrastructure. The engine ensures that web apps are secure and running and enables the firewall to save them from malware and threats.
- Powerful application diagnostics: Google App engine uses cloud monitoring and cloud logging to monitor the health and performance of the app and to diagnose and fix bugs quickly it uses cloud debugger and error reporting.
- Application versioning: It easily hosts different versions of the app, and create development, test, staging, and production environments.
- Application security: Google App Engine helps safeguard the application by defining access rules with an App Engine firewall and leverage managed SSL/TLS certificates by default on the custom domain without incurring any additional cost.
Note: You Can Check our Blog Post on Creating Google Cloud Account.
Frequently Asked Questions
What languages are supported by Google App Engine?
Google App Engine support some popular languages like Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, C#, GO, .Net, and Ruby.
What are the services provided by the App Engine?
It is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides Web app developers and enterprises with access to Google's scalable hosting service. Google App Engine provides more infrastructure than other scalable hosting services like AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and also eliminates some system administration and developmental tasks to make it easier to write scalable applications.
What is the difference between Compute Engine and App Engine?
Compute Engine is an IaaS offering where the users have to create and configure their own virtual machine instances whereas App Engine is a PaaS offering where users have to deploy their code and everything else is handled by the platform.
Which companies or ventures are using Google App Engine?
Some big companies like Accenture, Snapchat, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc are currently using the App Engine.
When should you use App Engine?
Google App Engine is a perfect fit for web applications, mobile backends, IoT, Internal IT apps. But also users should avoid using it for media rendering, genetic science, data analysis, VM images, and stateful storage.
Related References
- GCP Associate Cloud Engineer: All You Need To Know About
- GCP Professional Cloud Architect: Everything You Need To Know
- Introduction To Google Cloud Platform
- Google Cloud Services & Tools
- Introduction To Google Compute Engine
- Top 30 GCP Interview Questions and Answers 2023
Next Task For You
If you are also interested and want to know more about the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification then register for our Free Class.
Leave a Reply