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App Engine

Description
  • Platform for building scalable web applications and mobile backends
  • Provides built-in services and APIs (e.g., NoSQL datastores, memcache, load balancing, health checks, application logging, and a user authentication API)

Environments

Environment Description
Standard
  • Based on container instances, preconfigured with one of several available runtimes (Java, Python, Go and PHP)
  • Features
    • Persistent storage with queries, sorting, and transactions
    • Automatic scaling and load balancing
    • Asynchronous/Scheduled tasks
  • Constraints
    • No writing to local file system
    • All requests time out at 60 seconds
    • Third-party software installations are limited
Flexible
  • Applications run inside Docker containers on Google Compute Engine VMs (App Engine manages the VMs)
  • No sandbox constraints (e.g., you can SSH into VMs)

Cloud Endpoints

Description
  • Distributed API management system
  • Exposes API using a RESTful interface
  • Controls access and validates calls with JSON Web Tokens and Google API keys
Features
  • User authentication: JWT validation, Firebase Auth, Google Auth, Auth0
  • Automated deployment:
    • App Engine: proxy is deployed automatically
    • GKE/Compute Engine: use Google's containerized ESP
  • Logging and monitoring: in Cloud Logging
  • API keys: can be validated on every API call