Cloud services offer a variety of services such as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or Platform as a service (PaaS) or Software as a service (SaaS). IaaS gives infrastructure resources as virtualized services which help them to build their own servers, network and data storage and OS. PaaS on the other hand gives developers a framework to build custom applications. 

Today we look more in detail about Google App Engine (Which is offered as PaaS solution) and Google Compute Engine (Which is offered as IaaS solution)  This article will give insight into the major differences between the two, its purpose for which they are deployed and use cases. 

What is a Google App Engine?  

Google App Engine is a PaaS solution which allows to deploy code in a simpler manner, and the platform automates everything else. It is fully scalable and if traffic of an application becomes higher it acquires more instances automatically. 

Features of Google App Engine

• Makes it easier to build application which runs reliability under heavy load and large amount of data 
• Dynamic web serving with full support for common web technologies
• Persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
• Auto scaling and load balancing
• User authentication using APIs and email via Google account
• Local development environment full feature blow simulation 

Pros and Cons of Google App Engine 

• Economically viable solution for low traffic applications and small businesses
• Capability to scale faster
• Version management and traffic splitting 
• Reduced management complexities 
• Faster access to data store
• Supports Memcache
• Secure as compared to Google compute engine

• Constrained as instances are small not suitable for large applications which require large virtual machine instances
• Networking is not integrated 

Use cases for Google App Engine

• Mobile backends
• Web applications
• Internal IT applications
• Frontend and Backend workload
• IoT 

What is a Google Compute Engine?

Google Compute Engine is an IaaS offering which lets you create virtual machines, allocate CPU and memory, and choose from solid state drive (SSD) or hard disk drive (HDD) storage. It allows you to create a workstation /computer virtually and you have complete control over Virtual machines in terms of scalability and load balancing. There are four categories of VMs that include: 

• Standard VMs – have balance between memory and computational power and ideal for majority of workload environments
• High memory VMs – have the optimization for memory intensive tasks which demand non-disk storage access quickly
• High CPU VMs – optimized for intensive computational workloads
• Shared core VMs – timeshare the physical core and ideal for applications which are small or demand less or no resources. 

Features of Google Compute Engine

• VM manager having suite of tools to manage the OS for large VM fleets
• Live migration of virtual machines without the need for rebooting
• Allows to create custom machine type which can complement tailored workloads
• Sole tenant nodes are servers which are dedicated for the users on priority
• Confidential virtual machine permit users to encrypt usable data during processing cycle 
• Local SSD block storage is supported for low latency
• GPU accelerators handle acceleration job for computationally intensive workloads 

Pros and Cons of Google App Engine 

• Easy ramp up no need to do ramp up simply reuse components from previous experience
• It eliminates the need of public Ips
• It allows to leverage container optimized operating systems to run docker containers

• High expertise level required
• Management overheads
• Auto scaling is slower compared to Google App Engine 

Use cases for Google Compute Engine 

• Running websites and databases
• Migrating on premises infrastructure to cloud 

Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine

Below table summarizes the difference between the two: 

Download the comparison table: Google App Engine vs Google Compute Engine