Google App Engine

For many solutions, control over infrastructure represents a burden rather than a benefit. These solutions may be better suited to an environment that manages services at the application layer. This need has given rise to a class of services known as PaaS. With PaaS, aspects like application scaling and lifecycle management are simple to configure and are usually managed by the platform itself.

As container technologies continue to grow in popularity, many PaaS solutions look to incorporate containers into their core offerings. This is a trend that is likely to continue and somewhat blurs the lines between PaaS and CaaS. Generally speaking, PaaS can be considered a superset of CaaS, with PaaS also encompassing platforms that abstract away containerization or avoid it entirely. In addition to managing services at the application layer, most PaaS offerings include a host of service integrations such as service discovery and routing. Google App Engine falls squarely into the category of PaaS and will be the primary subject of this chapter.