App Engine allows developers to focus on what they do best: writing code. BasedonCompute Engine, the App Engine flexible environmentautomatically scales your app up and down while also balancing the load.

Runtimes

You can customize these runtimes or provide your own runtime by supplying acustom Docker image or Dockerfile from the open source community.

Features

• Customizable infrastructure - App Engine flexible environment instancesareCompute Engine virtual machines, which means that you can takeadvantage of custom libraries, use SSH for debugging, and deploy your ownDocker containers.

• Performance options - Take advantage of a wide array of CPU and memoryconfigurations. You can specify how much CPU and memory each instance of yourapplication needs, and the App Engine flexible environment provisions the necessaryinfrastructure for you.

• Native feature support - Features such as microservices, authorization,SQL and NoSQL databases, traffic splitting, logging, versioning, securityscanning, and content delivery networks are natively supported.

• Managed virtual machines - App Engine manages your virtual machines,ensuring that:

  • Instances are health-checked, healed as necessary, and co-located with otherservices within the project.
  • Critical, backwards compatible updates are automatically applied to theunderlying operating system.
  • VM instances are automatically located by geographical region according tothe settings in your project. Google's management services ensure that allof a project's VM instances are co-located for optimal performance.
  • All flexible instances may be restarted on a weekly basis if there areupdates available. This schedule is not guaranteed. During restarts,Google's management services apply any necessary operating system andsecurity updates.
  • You always have root access to Compute Engine VM instances. SSH access to VMinstances in the App Engine flexible environment is disabled by default. If you choose,you can enable root access to your app's VM instances.

• Auto scaling - App Engine automatically scales your applicationbased on incoming load.

  • App Engine respects any Compute Engine VM reservations that youalready have in a region that match your configuration. Having a VMreservation increases the likelihood that you will receive a resourceallocation during atemporary resource shortage.

Learn about thedifferences between the standard environment and the flexible environment.