While I agree App Engine can be a pain — its learning curve is extremely steep and painful (especially if deciding to delve into the Standard Environment), I think its good points outweigh its bad. For example, App Engine Std gives you 28 free instance hours a day (frontend F1 class) and 9 free instance hours (backend/microservice B1 class) per Project. This means a small or prototype project can and will run for free (my experience is up to 10 concurrent requests— meaning 10 simultaneous per instance on F1 or B1 class).

By the way, App Engine Std deploy can take several minutes the first time due to loading all the libraries and files to a Cloud Storage Bucket. Subsequent changes can take less than a minute (I don’t use Flex environment so I have nothing to compare to).

(edit 11.10.2018 — with Go 1.11.2 using go modules and Google Cloud SDK 223.0.0, the deploy can be painfully slow. I attribute this to beta. On a positive note, the deployment size went from 12.8MB to 15.5KB.)

I agree the use case is what should drive whether GCE, GKE, or GAE. However, I have found if I take the time to understand the “Google way/reason” for doing something, then the pain starts to go away and I am left with awe at how simple the end product is.

GoDoc and Google Cloud support for Golang are sometimes slim or none existent, yet I have found if you are willing to put in the effort (and can afford to!) App Engine is actually a very good product.

Not for the faint of heart!!! I completely understand where you are coming from. Great article…