Deis vs Google App Engine: What are the differences?

What is Deis? Open Source PaaS that builds upon Docker and CoreOS to provide a lightweight PaaS with a Heroku-inspired workflow. Deis can deploy any application or service that can run inside a Docker container. In order to be scaled horizontally, applications must follow Heroku's 12-factor methodology and store state in external backing services.

What is Google App Engine? Build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications. Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Deis and Google App Engine can be categorized as "Platform as a Service" tools.

Some of the features offered by Deis are:

• Deis can deploy any language or framework using a Dockerfile
• If you don't have a Dockerfile, Deis includes Heroku buildpacks for Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java, Clojure, Scala, Play, PHP, Perl, Dart and Go.
• Deis can be deployed on any system that supports CoreOS including your workstation, as well as most public clouds, private clouds and bare metal.

On the other hand, Google App Engine provides the following key features:

• Zero to sixty: Scale your app automatically without worrying about managing machines.
• Supercharged APIs: Supercharge your app with services such as Task Queue, XMPP, and Cloud SQL, all powered by the same infrastructure that powers the Google services you use every day.
• You're in control: Manage your application with a simple, web-based dashboard allowing you to customize your app's performance.

"12-factor methodology" is the primary reason why developers consider Deis over the competitors, whereas "Easy to deploy" was stated as the key factor in picking Google App Engine.

Deis is an open source tool with 6.12K GitHub stars and 863 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Deis's open source repository on GitHub.