Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Google App Engine VS Cast.ai

Compare Google App Engine VS Cast.ai and see what are their differences

Google App Engine logo Google App Engine

A powerful platform to build web and mobile apps that scale automatically.

Cast.ai logo Cast.ai

CAST AI is an AI-driven platform designed to optimize cloud usage and reduce costs by over 60%. It is an all-in-one solution for Kubernetes monitoring, automation, optimization, and security.
  • Google App Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-17
  • Cast.ai Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-25

CAST AI is driven by a vision of decentralizing the cloud industry to free innovators from the limitations of cloud service providers. Our AI-powered cloud optimization engine delivers a cost-efficient, high-performing, and resilient infrastructure for every Kubernetes workload. Its unique blend of automation and optimization algorithms empowers innovators to build future-ready products and embrace the autonomous cloud. No more vendor lock-in or downtime, the cloud just got solved.

Cast.ai

Website
cast.ai
$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Browser Azure AWS Cloud Web
Release Date
2020 November

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.

Cast.ai features and specs

  • Monitoring
  • Analytics and Reporting
  • Analytics dashboards
  • Managed Services
  • Cloud Technology

Google App Engine videos

Get to know Google App Engine

More videos:

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

Cast.ai videos

Ep 160 Cast.ai and Kubernetes Challenges with Leon Kuperman, CTO and Co-Founder of Cast.AI

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Google App Engine and Cast.ai)
Cloud Computing
90 90%
10% 10
Cloud Hosting
94 94%
6% 6
Developer Tools
59 59%
41% 41
Backend As A Service
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Google App Engine and Cast.ai. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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...

Cast.ai Reviews

We have no reviews of Cast.ai yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Google App Engine might be a bit more popular than Cast.ai. We know about 31 links to it since March 2021 and only 24 links to Cast.ai. 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.

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 / 4 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 / 6 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 / 7 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 / 10 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 / 10 months ago
View more

Cast.ai mentions (24)

  • What is the role of QoS for Pods?
    There are tools CastAI (https://cast.ai/) and KubeCost (https://www.kubecost.com/) which helps you get these values. I haven't tried it personally, but they are promising. There are other tools as well. One of the approach OP suggested, monitor the values over a period of time to determine the right requests value, is really good one. I would modify it a bit. Generally take the p95 value for requests and 1.5-2x... Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Kubernetes Cost Monitoring
    Not sire if this helps but someone just showed me this free tool that looks at cost for Kube https://cast.ai/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Is k8s Kops preferable than eks?
    Curious about what about cast.ai sets it apart for you? I went with spot because it is owned by a big company and knew it wasn't going to disappear. I think cast was still in invite only mode, as well. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Scheduled spindown/up of clusters?
    I found that cast.ai seems to have this functionality but am wondering if there is a free option. Also pursuing gMaestro but they're not available on arm64 yet. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Reducing AWS costs?
    If you're using Kubernetes, CAST AI is the fastest way to significantly reduce your compute bill and keep it there. It manages compute capacity automatically and has dedicated support to get you started even faster. The best part - Kubernetes cost monitoring and security insights are free. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Google App Engine and Cast.ai, 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.

OpenShift - OpenShift gives you all the tools you need to develop, host and scale your apps in the public or private cloud. Get started today.

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

CloudStack - Apache's CloudStack is a Project backed by Citrix and designed to be a direct competitor to...

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.

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker