Google App Engine vs Fly.io Comparison

Google App Engine and Fly.io are among the most competitive PaaS providers that bring IT infrastructure for businesses of all scales.

No matter what project you are working on, using PaaS can make things easy by removing the need to manage any hardware or IT infrastructure. If selecting one of these is tricky, this comparison will help you finalize your decision.

Google App Engine

App Engine brings a serverless approach to meet all your IT infrastructure needs. This PaaS manages every backend requirement of your website while reducing the need for an on-site IT management team or hardware. It also offers increased security as your app is running on Google’s data centers based on the cloud.

App Engine also increases the reliability of your application as it comes with strong analytics features. In this way, it ensures that the performance is never affected. While developing apps with App Engine, you will never need to focus on backend and infrastructure requirements but only have to work for the basic features.

Application Security

App Engine not only offers security by running on Google’s data centers, but it brings its custom firewalls to reduce the chances of malware attacks.

In addition, it provides managed SSL and TLS certificates for the security of your application. All of this with no additional cost at your end.

Application diagnostics

The application diagnostics features from App Engine are extremely powerful. The cloud monitoring feature monitors your app for its health and its performance.

The cloud logging and debugger features track the results and issue error reports. These reports make finding and resolving errors easier.

Application versioning

With App Engine, you can simultaneously host your application’s different old and new versions. It is extremely helpful for providing good performance for different users across different regions. Versioning also helps in development, staging, production environments, and testing.

Services ecosystem

App Engine comes with a growing ecosystem of cloud services from Google. These can be integrated with your application to form a complete suite of development tools based in the cloud environment. Thus, it provides easier access, collaboration, testing, and updating experience.

Google App Engine Pricing Plan

You can start with App Engine for free with limited resources, and if you want to use the paid services, you will be charged only for the instances you use.

However, App Engine also comes with a scalability feature so that your resources can be scaled according to the app’s traffic requirements.

Google App Engine also provides a price estimation calculator where you can select all the instances to get an overview of the price you will be paying.

Fly.io

Fly.io helps you deploy applications on its servers, where you can select a virtually closer server to your users.

This way, your full-stack applications can provide a better user experience and performance worldwide. Fly.io allows you to include all the features and functionalities in your application without compromising.

With its physical servers spread across different cities, your users can always enjoy a maximum performance at no additional cost.

It ensures low latency and higher reliability, so if you upgrade from another platform to Fly.io, you can see a performance upgrade of up to 60%.

One of the best things about Fly.io is that it does not need a lot of code. So, you can add as many features as you want without providing a lot of code.

Scalability

Fly.io comes with flexible resources that you can select with a single tap. The Ram, Storage, and CPU here can be scaled per the requirement, and your budget will not be drastically affected. So, with this scalability and performance guarantee, your application will always offer a top-notch user experience.

Powerful insights

Fly.io provides metrics and alerting features in graphical form so that you are always aware of everything happening with your application. Handling requirements and updates can be much easier this way.

Highly reliable

Fly.io provides global private networking and load-balancing features without any configurations. So, things not only get easier at your end but the reliability and efficiency of your application increase.

You also have the choice to add security certificates to your application to make it more trustworthy and safer for every visitor.

PostgreSQL clusters

Launching PostgreSQL clusters with Fly.io is extremely simple and quick. It only takes 1 command and offers high availability.

The best part is that this feature comes with a free plan so that every application can perform well across different regions.

Fly.io Pricing Plan

Fly.io brings one of the best pricing plans among all the PaaS providers. Although it charges using the same pay-as-you-go system as Google App Engine, it also has distinctive pricing plans to make things clear and transparent. Below are the details of the pricing plans at Fly.io.

1.     Hobby Plan

The Hobby plan is good enough for smaller full-stack applications. Interestingly, it is available for free forever at the cost of restricted resources and performance.

2.     Launch Plan

If the hobby plan is not good enough for your requirements, you can switch to the Launch plan starting at $29 per month.

It brings more power for higher performance, workloads, and dedicated virtual machines. Here you also get email support.

3.     Scale Plan

The Scale Plan is the perfect choice for your app if you want higher availability under all sorts of workloads and want your application to work in multiple regions.

The scale plan costs $199 monthly and meets all compliance and support requirements with priority email support.

4.     Enterprise Plan

If the scale plan does not meet your requirements and you need custom usage resources, emergency support, uptime SLA, and custom features, then you need to contact the Fly.io sales team. They will provide you with custom pricing according to your enterprise-grade requirements.

Fly.io vs App Engine Comparison

Conclusion

Fly.io and Google App Engine are known for their service quality, features, and competitive pricing. That’s why selecting one among these can be difficult. For the maximum results from the platform you choose, you must choose it according to your specific resource and feature requirements.

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