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Comment by Hermel | Hacker News Reader

Are you happy with the performance of AppEngine?

I have tried it last summer and was quite disappointed. CPU-bound programs that completed in a few seconds on my own computer took about ten times as long on AppEngine despite similar nominal specs (GHz and RAM).

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If you like the App Engine model, but want a "full computer worth of horsepower", you might want to consider our "Managed VM" environment built on top of Compute Engine: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

Managed VM is still beta, I think only brave one could try beta for production.

We have been using Managed VMs in production for while now, integrated in a micro-services architecture, for non-essential, non-frontend services and are quite happy with it. Using custom VMs (Docker based) and work like a breeze.

I love GCE. I really would like to see Node on it natively, without the need for ManagedVM. I tried it a while ago and did not want to deal with all of the Docker stuff. It was especially a pain on Windows. :(

Traditional App Engine is not particularly cost-effective for compute-intensive loads, but it works great for basic web workloads. If you have special needs, Managed VMs have the performance characteristics of the underlying Compute Engine node. We've found that App Engine is not "all or nothing"; it's the backbone of our app but we run services where they make the most sense (usually GCE).

In addition to all the excellent comments here. Let's not forget that the massive massive Snapchat runs almost entirely on Google AppEngine. So if AppEngine can handle their scale, it can handle most others :)

No longer true. It's all GCE now last I heard.

Where'd you hear that?

Not without risk of giving an argument from authority, your sources are inaccurate. As late as November of last year Snapchat was on stage talking about their broad AppEngine use. (I work on Google Cloud).

App Engine Product Manager here

Default AppEngine instance is only running at 600MHz. You can choose to pay for a faster instance:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/modules/#Pyth...

App Engine expects your web apps to return almost immediately (in a matter of few ms). For anything that takes longer, you need to use task queues in App Engine. Or maybe try AppEngine Managed VM's?

App Engine requests time out after 60 seconds (that's 60000 ms).

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/articles/deadlineexceeded...

(I work at Google, but not on App Engine)

They don't have to if you use Basic or Manual Scaling (Then they can run up to 24 hours).

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/modules/#Java_I...

If you run multiple modules at once (some serving the frontend, some for longer tasks w/task queues), you can have the best of both worlds and use different scaling options for each.

(I also work at Google, but also not on App Engine)

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