Google App Engine vs Google Kubernetes Engine

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Google App Engine

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Google Kubernetes Engine

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Google App Engine vs Google Kubernetes Engine: What are the differences?

Introduction

Google App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine are two different cloud computing platforms offered by Google. While both platforms provide solutions for deploying and managing applications, they differ in several key aspects.

  1. Scalability and Flexibility: Google App Engine is a fully managed platform that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure and automatically scales applications based on demand. It allows developers to focus on building their applications without worrying about infrastructure management. On the other hand, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provides a container orchestration platform that allows users to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale. GKE provides a high level of flexibility, allowing users to have fine-grained control over the infrastructure and scaling policies.

  2. Deployment Model: In Google App Engine, applications are deployed using an app.yaml configuration file, which specifies the runtime environment and resources required for the application. The deployment process is straightforward, and Google handles the rest, including auto-scaling, load balancing, and maintenance. In contrast, GKE follows a container-based deployment model, where applications are packaged into containers using Docker and deployed as pods on a cluster of virtual machines. This gives users more control over the deployment process and allows them to choose the container image and configuration.

  3. Resource Management: Google App Engine automatically manages the allocation of resources based on the application's needs. It scales the application horizontally by creating new instances when the demand increases and shutting down instances when the demand decreases. GKE, on the other hand, allows users to define and manage resource allocation manually. Users can specify the number of pods, their resource requirements, and scaling policies based on their specific needs.

  4. Cost Structure: Google App Engine follows a pricing model based on the resources consumed by the application, including CPU usage, storage, and network bandwidth. The pricing is based on the actual usage of the application and the number of instances created. GKE, on the other hand, follows a pricing model based on the underlying virtual machine instances and the usage of additional Google Cloud services. Users are billed based on the number of running virtual machines and the additional resources utilized.

  5. Platform Abstraction: Google App Engine abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, providing a simple and easy-to-use platform for deploying and managing applications. It simplifies the development process by handling tasks such as load balancing, auto-scaling, and maintenance. GKE, on the other hand, provides a more low-level infrastructure management platform. It offers more control and flexibility but requires users to have a deeper understanding of infrastructure management and containerization.

  6. Supported Workloads: Google App Engine is well-suited for web applications, mobile app backends, and simple APIs. It provides a managed environment for running applications without the need for infrastructure management. GKE, on the other hand, is more suitable for complex workloads that require fine-grained control over the infrastructure, such as microservices architectures, batch processing, and big data workloads.

In summary, Google App Engine is a fully managed platform that abstracts away infrastructure management, while Google Kubernetes Engine provides a more flexible and scalable container orchestration platform. App Engine simplifies development and is suitable for simpler workloads, while GKE offers more control and is better suited for complex and scalable applications.

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Pros of Google App Engine
Pros of Google Kubernetes Engine
  • 145
    Easy to deploy
  • 106
    Auto scaling
  • 80
    Good free plan
  • 62
    Easy management
  • 56
    Scalability
  • 35
    Low cost
  • 32
    Comprehensive set of features
  • 28
    All services in one place
  • 22
    Simple scaling
  • 19
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 6
    Granular Billing
  • 5
    Easy to develop and unit test
  • 4
    Monitoring gives comprehensive set of key indicators
  • 3
    Really easy to quickly bring up a full stack
  • 3
    Create APIs quickly with cloud endpoints
  • 2
    Mostly up
  • 2
    No Ops
  • 17
    Backed by Google
  • 17
    Powered by kubernetes
  • 12
    Docker
  • 11
    Scalable
  • 6
    Open source
  • 2
    Command line interface is intuitive
  • 2
    Decoupled app
  • 1
    Provisioning
  • 1
    Declarative management

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What is Google App Engine?

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.

What is Google Kubernetes Engine?

Container Engine takes care of provisioning and maintaining the underlying virtual machine cluster, scaling your application, and operational logistics like logging, monitoring, and health management.

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What are some alternatives to Google App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine?
Heroku
Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.
DigitalOcean
We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
See all alternatives