Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Cloud Foundry VS Google App Engine

Compare Cloud Foundry VS Google App Engine and see what are their differences

Cloud Foundry logo Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, making it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications from an IDE or the command line.

Google App Engine logo Google App Engine

A powerful platform to build web and mobile apps that scale automatically.
  • Cloud Foundry Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-07
  • Google App Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-17

Cloud Foundry features and specs

  • Open-Source
    Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service (PaaS) that provides developers with a cloud application platform for deploying modern applications.
  • Multi-Cloud Support
    Cloud Foundry supports multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and on-premises infrastructures, offering flexibility in deployment.
  • Language Support
    It supports numerous programming languages and frameworks, including Java, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Python, .NET, and Go.
  • Scalability
    It allows for easy scalability, enabling applications to handle growth without significant performance drops.
  • Enterprise Integration
    Cloud Foundry integrates well with enterprise systems, including logging, monitoring, and maintaining services at scale.
  • Developer Productivity
    Streamlined deployment processes and continuous delivery pipelines improve developer productivity and reduce time-to-market.
  • Service Marketplace
    The platform offers a marketplace of services such as databases, messaging, and caching, reducing the overhead of managing these services directly.
  • Built-in Monitoring
    Cloud Foundry comes with built-in monitoring tools to oversee applications, enabling efficient performance tracking and issue resolution.

Possible disadvantages of Cloud Foundry

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up a Cloud Foundry environment can be complex and require a steep learning curve for new users.
  • Resource Intensive
    It can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational resources for smooth operation, which might not suit smaller applications or low-budget projects.
  • Customization Limitations
    While flexible, Cloud Foundry might not offer the level of customization that some specialized applications may require.
  • Cost
    operating a Cloud Foundry environment on public clouds can become costly, especially as the demand for more resources scales up.
  • Vendor Lock-in Risk
    Despite its multi-cloud nature, there can still be a risk of vendor lock-in due to proprietary features or services.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Maintaining and updating Cloud Foundry itself can become overhead, requiring dedicated DevOps efforts.
  • Performance Issues
    In multi-tenant environments, there might be occasional performance issues due to the shared nature of the underlying infrastructure.
  • Security Concerns
    Though secure, managing security at scale requires diligence to ensure data protection and regulatory compliance.

Google App Engine features and specs

  • Auto-scaling
    Google App Engine automatically scales your application based on the traffic it receives, ensuring that your application can handle varying workloads without manual intervention.
  • Managed environment
    App Engine provides a fully managed environment, covering infrastructure management tasks like server provisioning, patching, monitoring, and managing app versions.
  • Integrated services
    Seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services such as Datastore, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and more, offering a comprehensive ecosystem for building and deploying applications.
  • Multiple languages support
    Supports multiple programming languages including Java, Python, PHP, Node.js, Go, Ruby, and .NET, giving developers flexibility in choosing their preferred language.
  • Security
    Offers robust security features including Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cloud Identity, and automated security updates, which help protect your applications from vulnerabilities.
  • Developer productivity
    App Engine allows rapid development and deployment, letting developers focus on writing code without worrying about infrastructure management, thus boosting productivity.
  • Versioning
    Supports versioning of applications, allowing multiple versions of the application to be hosted simultaneously, which helps in A/B testing and rollback capabilities.

Possible disadvantages of Google App Engine

  • Cost
    While you pay for what you use, costs can escalate quickly with high traffic or resource-intensive applications. Detailed cost prediction can be challenging.
  • Vendor lock-in
    Relying heavily on Google App Engine's proprietary services and APIs can make it difficult to migrate applications to other platforms, leading to vendor lock-in.
  • Limited control
    Being a fully managed service, App Engine provides limited control over the underlying infrastructure which might be a limitation for certain advanced use cases.
  • Environment constraints
    Certain restrictions and limitations are imposed on the runtime environment, such as request timeout limits and specific resource quotas, which can affect application performance.
  • Complex debugging
    Debugging issues in a highly abstracted managed environment can be more complex and difficult compared to traditional server-hosted applications.
  • Cold start latency
    Serverless environments like App Engine can suffer from cold start latency, where the initial request triggers a delay as the environment spins up resources.
  • Configuration complexity
    Despite its benefits, configuring and optimizing App Engine for specific scenarios can be more complex than expected, requiring a steep learning curve.

Analysis of Cloud Foundry

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Cloud Foundry is a good choice for organizations seeking a reliable and feature-rich PaaS solution. Its open-source nature, combined with the extensive ecosystem and strong community support, makes it a valuable tool for developers aiming to deploy cloud-native applications efficiently.

Why this product is good

  • Cloud Foundry is considered a robust and mature platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. It is open-source, which allows for flexibility and customization. One of its key strengths is its ability to handle a wide variety of workloads, providing developers with a consistent and portable cloud-native app development environment across different cloud providers. With features like auto-scaling, centralized logging, and application health management, it offers a comprehensive platform for deploying and managing applications. Additionally, Cloud Foundry supports multiple programming languages and is backed by a strong community and industry support from major companies.

Recommended for

    Cloud Foundry is particularly recommended for enterprise-level businesses that require a stable and scalable platform for deploying a variety of applications. It is well-suited for teams that prefer open-source solutions and need multi-cloud capabilities. Cloud Foundry is also ideal for organizations looking to leverage continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices to improve their development processes.

Analysis of Google App Engine

Overall verdict

  • Google App Engine is generally considered a good choice for developers looking for a serverless platform to deploy their applications quickly without managing underlying infrastructure. Its ease of use, scalability, and integration with Google's ecosystem make it a strong option, especially for projects expecting to scale significantly or require integration with other Google Cloud services.

Why this product is good

  • Google App Engine is a fully managed serverless platform that allows developers to build scalable web applications and mobile backends. It abstracts away infrastructure management, handles scaling automatically, and offers integration with other Google Cloud services, providing a high degree of flexibility and efficiency. Its key strengths include support for multiple programming languages, built-in security features, and seamless connectivity to Google's machine learning and data analytics tools.

Recommended for

    Google App Engine is recommended for developers building web applications who prefer a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, startups who need a solution that can grow with them without worrying about scaling issues, teams wanting to leverage Google's robust data and analytics offerings, and businesses that require a global reach with reliable performance.

Cloud Foundry videos

Inside Cloud Foundry: An Architectural Review

More videos:

  • Review - Review of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 in Basel
  • Review - Resource Management Ecosystem and Cloud Foundry - A Review of the State of the Art

Google App Engine videos

Get to know Google App Engine

More videos:

  • Review - Developing apps that scale automatically with Google App Engine

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cloud Foundry and Google App Engine)
Cloud Computing
16 16%
84% 84
Cloud Hosting
11 11%
89% 89
Developer Tools
38 38%
62% 62
Backend As A Service
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Cloud Foundry and Google App Engine

Cloud Foundry Reviews

We have no reviews of Cloud Foundry yet.
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Google App Engine Reviews

Top 5 Alternatives to Heroku
Google App Engine is fast, easy, but not that very cheap. The pricing is reasonable, and it comes with a free tier, which is great for small projects that are right for beginner developers who want to quickly set up their apps. It can also auto scale, create new instances as needed and automatically handle high availability. App Engine gets a positive rating for performance...
AppScale - The Google App Engine Alternative
AppScale is open source Google App Engine and allows you to run your GAE applications on any infrastructure, anywhere that makes sense for your business. AppScale eliminates lock-in and makes your GAE application portable. This way you can choose which public or private cloud platform is the best fit for your business requirements. Because we are literally the GAE...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google App Engine seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 31 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cloud Foundry mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Cloud Foundry yet. Tracking of Cloud Foundry recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Google App Engine mentions (31)

  • Guide to modern app-hosting without servers on Google Cloud
    If Google App Engine (GAE) is the "OG" serverless platform, Cloud Run (GCR) is its logical successor, crafted for today's modern app-hosting needs. GAE was the 1st generation of Google serverless platforms. It has since been joined, about a decade later, by 2nd generation services, GCR and Cloud Functions (GCF). GCF is somewhat out-of-scope for this post so I'll cover that another time. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Security in the Cloud: Your Role in the Shared Responsibility Model
    As Windsales Inc. expands, it adopts a PaaS model to offload server and runtime management, allowing its developers and engineers to focus on code development and deployment. By partnering with providers like Heroku and Google App Engine, Windsales Inc. Accesses a fully managed runtime environment. This choice relieves Windsales Inc. Of managing servers, OS updates, or runtime environment behavior. Instead,... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Hosting apps in the cloud with Google App Engine in 2024
    Google App Engine (GAE) is their original serverless solution and first cloud product, launching in 2008 (video), giving rise to Serverless 1.0 and the cloud computing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) service level. It didn't do function-hosting nor was the concept of containers mainstream yet. GAE was specifically for (web) app-hosting (but also supported mobile backends as well). - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Fixing A Broken Deployment to Google App Engine
    In 2014, I took a web development on Udacity that was taught by Steve Huffman of Reddit fame. He taught authentication, salting passwords, the difference between GET and POST requests, basic html and css, caching techniques. It was a fantastic introduction to web dev. To pass the course, students deployed simple python servers to Google App Engine. When I started to look for work, I opted to use code from that... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Next.js Deployment: Vercel's Charm vs. GCP's Muscle
    GCP offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, including Compute Engine, App Engine, and Cloud Run. This translates to unparalleled control over your infrastructure and deployment configurations. Designed for large-scale applications, GCP effortlessly scales to accommodate significant traffic growth. Additionally, for projects heavily reliant on Google services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, or AI/ML tools,... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cloud Foundry and Google App Engine, you can also consider the following products

Salesforce Platform - Salesforce Platform is a comprehensive PaaS solution that paves the way for the developers to test, build, and mitigate the issues in the cloud application before the final deployment.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Heroku - Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Dokku - Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 100 lines of Bash

Now Platform - Get native platform intelligence, so you can predict, prioritize, and proactively manage the work that matters most with the NOW Platform from ServiceNow.