App Engine vs. Cloud Run: Part 1 - Introduction

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Developer Blogs | Cloud Platforms | 4 min read

App Engine vs. Cloud Run: Part 1 - Introduction


Are you a developer who has developed an awesome app? But you don’t know where and how to host it? No worries, we’ve got you covered! This is a three-part series of blog posts that will give you an idea of Google’s two cloud platforms, i.e., App Engine and Cloud Run, and how you can host your products and services on them. 

This blog post is Part 1 of the series, which will introduce you to App Engine and Cloud Run. The next post, “App Engine vs. Cloud Run: Part 2 - How to deploy and host your apps on the cloud”, will cover the challenges and their solutions while deploying and hosting your apps on the cloud platforms. So if errors pop up on your screen, look up our blog and find the solutions. Finally, “Part 3 - Post deployment challenges and solutions”, will throw light on the challenges you may face after deploying apps on App Engine and Cloud Run and solutions to overcome those challenges. 

Let's dive into App Engine and Cloud Run!


Table of contents

  • App Engine and Cloud Run - Serverless Cloud Platforms

  • Features of App Engine and Cloud Run


App Engine and Cloud Run - Serverless Cloud Platforms

Hosting a server comes with an additional duty of managing the server, but Google got your back here! App Engine and Cloud Run are two serverless cloud computing resources that you can use to host and manage applications, websites, etc., without worrying about server maintenance and management. 


App Engine is used to develop scalable web and mobile applications. App Engine supports programming languages such as Go, PHP, Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, and Ruby in its standard environment. It also supports apps developed in other languages via "custom runtimes" in its flexible environment. Developers using App Engine to deploy and host their apps can concentrate more on writing the code and less on trivial activities like operations, configuring, scaling their services, etc. Isn’t that great!


App Engine can be used for many purposes. A few use cases are:

  1. Mobile backends: Mobile backends deployed on App Engine are automatically scaled up in the hosting environment. It is very useful for developers who have built an app for the first time. The apps can be seamlessly integrated with Firebase.

  2. Speed to market: Businesses can develop their apps and deploy them on App Engine to launch their apps quickly in the market and reach out to maximum customers. The serverless platform also automatically scales up the environment to support sudden traffic spikes without provisioning, patching or monitoring.


Cloud Run is a compute platform (an environment where software is executed) on which you run containers directly using Google's scalable infrastructure. Similar to App Engine, developers using Cloud Run can write better code. You can increase productivity without creating a cluster or managing infrastructure. Developers can build custom containers in various coding languages and easily host them on Cloud Run. 


Cloud Run can be used for many purposes. A few use cases are:

  1. Back‐office administration: It involves a lot of activities like managing documents, running containerized applications, etc. If you host the apps on Cloud Run, then they will always be available for use, and users will be billed only when they use the apps.

  2. API services: Developers can manage data reliably on databases using API services deployed on Cloud Run. Users can access app resource data stored in Cloud Databases. 


Both cloud platforms have built-in security features, such as HTTPS encryption for network communication and automatic security patching for the underlying infrastructure. They also provide options for securing access to apps, such as:

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and permissions, which ensure that only authorized users can access the apps

  • Integration with external authentication and authorization systems


Features of App Engine and Cloud Run


Feature Comparison of App Engine and Cloud Run


In terms of functionality:

  • App Engine runs continuously and responds to requests immediately, whereas Cloud Run only operates when requests come in.

  • For App Engine, you must pay for the total duration of time it was running, whereas you don't pay for idle time with Cloud Run. Hence, Cloud Run is generally cheaper to use.

  • Usually, App Engine responds slightly faster than Cloud Run.


In terms of security:

the primary difference between App Engine and Cloud Run is that Cloud Run provides more control over the underlying infrastructure, allowing for more fine-grained security configuration. For example, Cloud Run service allows you to deploy applications within a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) for network isolation, and also supports running applications in your own private cluster, which provides additional control over network security. 

Products and services hosted on App Engine as well as Cloud Run have a 99.95% uptime. Hence, developers must choose the platform that best suits them depending on the language and framework used, on a case-by-case basis. 

I hope that developers find this blog post useful. In the next part, I will describe in detail the procedure to deploy and host a project on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), along with the challenges you may face in the process and their solutions. Bugsmirror team will keep publishing more such blog posts to help the developer community and also provide curious readers with informative articles to read.


- Avani, Member of Technical Staff

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