Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Google App Engine VS UpCloud

Compare Google App Engine VS UpCloud 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.

UpCloud logo UpCloud

World's fastest cloud servers with a 100% uptime SLA!
  • Google App Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-17
  • UpCloud Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-14

UpCloud

Release Date
2011 January
Startup details
Country
Finland
City
Helsinki
Founder(s)
Joel Pihlajamaa
Employees
10 - 19

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.

UpCloud features and specs

  • High Performance
    UpCloud offers high-performance cloud servers with faster-than-SSD storage, which improves application speed and reliability.
  • Customization
    Users have a wide range of customization options for their server configurations, allowing tailored solutions for different needs.
  • Global Data Centers
    UpCloud has data centers in multiple locations around the world, providing global reach and redundancy.
  • 99.99% Uptime SLA
    UpCloud guarantees a 99.99% uptime SLA, ensuring high reliability and availability for hosted services.
  • Flexible Pricing
    The platform offers flexible pricing models, including pay-per-hour billing, which can be economical for certain use cases.
  • Free Trial
    New users can take advantage of a free trial to test the service before committing financially.

Possible disadvantages of UpCloud

  • Limited Managed Services
    UpCloud primarily provides infrastructure as a service, which means fewer managed services compared to competitors.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    Compared to larger competitors, UpCloud has a smaller ecosystem of third-party integrations and community support.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The platform may be complex for beginners or small businesses without technical expertise to set up and manage.
  • Higher Cost at Scale
    While flexible, the pricing can become higher compared to competitors when scaled to larger infrastructure needs.

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.

Google App Engine videos

Get to know Google App Engine

More videos:

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

UpCloud videos

UpCloud - Review and Introduction (Best Cloud Service Provider)

More videos:

  • Review - Deploy UpCloud server instance

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Google App Engine and UpCloud)
Cloud Computing
84 84%
16% 16
VPS
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Backend As A Service
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Google App Engine and UpCloud. 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 UpCloud

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...

UpCloud Reviews

8 Best Free VPS Trials In 2024 [No Credit Card Required]
UpCloud started its journey in 2012 from Helsinki. They are a European cloud-based hosting service provider with a fast and reliable cloud platform.
13 Best Windows VPS and Cloud Hosting Platform
UpCloud is a European cloud service provider that provides on an hourly billed infrastructure-as-a-service. You can choose to host your Windows VM in their following 10 datacenters.
Source: geekflare.com
Best Vultr Alternatives and Competitor Cloud Services of 2022
UpCloud claims to offer the fastest cloud with a 100% SLA uptime guarantee otherwise, youโ€™ll be rewarded with 50x payback for any downtime longer than 5 minutes. The infrastructure is backed by an N+1 protocol to avoid a single point of failure, which means redundant networking. If youโ€™re moving from your old provider to Upcloud, there are no charges for data migration, itโ€™s...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google App Engine should be more popular than UpCloud. It has been mentiond 32 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.

Google App Engine mentions (32)

  • Unlocking the Cloud: Your Essential Guide to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Models
    Google App Engine - Google's fully managed platform for building scalable web and mobile backends. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • 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 / 9 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 / 11 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 / 12 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 / over 1 year ago
View more

UpCloud mentions (8)

  • Show HN: We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
    I know OVH and Hetzner gets mentioned a lot as European Cloud, but I thought I should bring UpCloud [1] for HN's attention. I also sometimes think OVH and Hetzner are not a fair comparison as much as I want competition to HyperScaler. Hetzner uses consumer grade component with a few server grade selections. [1] https://upcloud.com. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Beyond the Buzzwords: The Relevance of DORA Metrics in Contemporary Cloud Hosting for Developers
    UpCloud: Performance for Developers. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2024)
    UpCloud | https://upcloud.com | Helsinki, Finland or UTC+/-2 UpCloud is a leading European cloud service provider with a global cloud platform spanning four continents. We're hiring for our Managed Kubernetes (https://upcloud.com/products/managed-kubernetes) platform: * Senior Software Engineer โ€” Kubernetes Infrastructure: https://jobs.upcloud.com/o/senior-engineer-kubernetes * Lead Software Engineer โ€” Kubernetes... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How we built a 1% website in 3 days for โ‚ฌ7
    Plus finally, โ‚ฌ7 per month on servers from UpCloud - Simply an amazing cloud provider I've worked with for years. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • What is the easiest cloud server provider to get started with?
    Another one for smaller and easier clouds is UpCloud (https://upcloud.com/). Source: almost 4 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Google App Engine and UpCloud, 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.

Linode - We make it simple to develop, deploy, and scale cloud infrastructure at the best price-to-performance ratio in the market.

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

DigitalOcean - Simplifying cloud hosting. Deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds.

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.

CloudSigma - CloudSigma is increasingly being recognized for its advancement of the cloud IaaS industry.