Published: Jul 14, 2019 by Isaac Johnson

I’ve left both running for the last couple weeks.  I was interested to know what are real world costs.  

App Engine Flex

I’ve gotten little traffic to the endpoint but in the 8 days it’s been active, we’ve accumulated $10.12 in costs.  This is not a big app, as you recall, our config:

runtime: nodejs
api_version: '1.0'
env: flexible
threadsafe: true
manual_scaling:
  instances: 1
network: {}
resources:
  cpu: 1
  memory_gb: 0.5
  disk_size_gb: 10

This is a tall ask.  It’s not identical, but a standard n1 class for a month (not counting longer term discounts or any traffic costs) would be about $25.

How about App Engine Standard?

I’ve had the first part of my tutorial running for the same time but exposed via my blog for even longer.

As you recall from the config, it used a rather standard python configuration

runtime: python27
api_version: '1'
env: standard
threadsafe: false
instance_class: F1
handlers:
  - url: /.*
    script: myapp.application
automatic_scaling:
  min_idle_instances: automatic
  max_idle_instances: automatic
  min_pending_latency: automatic
  max_pending_latency: automatic
network: {}

We’ve gotten sips of traffic for this app as well:

Show how did we fair on costs?

One cent.

Summary:

App Engine Flex allows us to run a scalable containerized application without the overhead of GKE, however the costs of a single container can exceed an equivalent VM.  App Engine Standard, while limiting our supported code types is a very economical way to host utility code.  This does not mean App Engine Flex is without merit.  If you had an app that you wanted to run just some of the time, or it was a pre-curser to using GKE, AEF can be a viable option.

And just like AEF, we can route custom domains to AES just as easily: