Developing for the App Engine standard environment

Due to the highly managed nature of the App Engine standard environment, services built for this environment must be developed with certain considerations. Whereas traditional cloud-native design patterns tend to result in platform-agnostic services, the standard environment makes several assumptions on how a service is designed. The most significant deviation from traditional cloud-native service architecture is that the standard environment provides the runtime and server, while the service itself simply defines request handlers and any associated business logic.

Such design constraints present an issue for local development: a service must be designed to leverage the provided runtime and server. To this end, Google provides a set of language-specific components within the Cloud SDK, as well as a local development server. How services are built leveraging these tools varies slightly between languages, but the end result is a fully integrated local development process.