My 3 years experience in Google Cloud App Engine (Python 2 & Python 3)

First Serverless compute service by Google Cloud.

Introduction

Google Cloud has always believed in the vision of serverless by debuting with Google App Engine in 2008, the first fully serverless compute service. Since then, Google has evolved more serverless offerings in both application development and analytics.

I started working in Google App Engine in May 2017 and I am going to share my experience with GAE.

The reason we chose Google App Engine is its fully managed, scalable, flexible, easy to use, quick to build and deploy code in to production.

We are working in agile and deliver microservices to production every 2 weeks thanks to GAE.

It is fascinating, unique piece of service Google is offering.

** This is before Cloud Function and Cloud Run were introduced.**

Features of App Engine

• Fully managed: A fully managed environment lets you focus on code
• Application versioning : Easily host different versions of your app.
• Traffic splitting: Route incoming requests to different app versions, A/B test, and do incremental feature rollouts.
• Application security: Safeguard application by IAP (Identify Aware Proxy)
• Services ecosystem: Excellent integration with different Google Services.

App Engine Types

You can run the application using App Engine Standard or App Engine Flexible environment.

We have split our application in microservices and mostly used Standard environments which scales down to zero instances when there is no traffic. This saves lot of money (which customer wants). We hardly incur costs for our Development and Testing environments.

Choosing the environment as per Google.