Google App Engine vs Google Cloud Platform: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here is a comparison between Google App Engine (GAE) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

1. Scalability: Google App Engine is a fully managed platform that automatically scales your applications based on demand, allowing you to handle high traffic without worrying about infrastructure. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, provides a wide range of infrastructure services that can be customized for scalability, giving you more flexibility in managing your own resources.

2. Pricing Model: Google App Engine follows a simple pricing model where you pay for the resources consumed by your application, such as storage, CPU usage, and network bandwidth. With Google Cloud Platform, you have more granular control over pricing, as you can choose the type and size of each individual service you need, allowing for more cost optimization.

3. Service Offering: Google App Engine is primarily focused on hosting web applications, supporting multiple programming languages and frameworks. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, offers a wider range of services including virtual machines, containers, managed databases, analytics, machine learning, and more, giving you the ability to build complex applications and infrastructure.

4. Flexibility: Google App Engine provides a simplified and opinionated framework for developing applications, with certain restrictions on the runtime environment and available libraries. Google Cloud Platform offers more flexibility as you can choose your own programming language, runtime, and customize the infrastructure according to your specific needs.

5. Deployment and Management: Google App Engine simplifies the deployment and management process by handling infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and monitoring automatically. In Google Cloud Platform, you have more control over the deployment process, allowing you to choose from multiple deployment methods such as virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions, and giving you more flexibility in managing the lifecycle of your applications.

6. Integration with Other Google Services: Google App Engine provides seamless integration with other Google services such as Firebase, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, and more, making it easy to build end-to-end solutions. While Google Cloud Platform also integrates with these services, it provides a broader range of options and integrations with other third-party services as well.

In Summary, Google App Engine and Google Cloud Platform offer different approaches to application development and infrastructure management. GAE is a fully managed platform focused on simplicity and scalability, while GCP provides a wider range of services with more flexibility and customization options.