Why choosing Google Kubernetes Engine instead of Google AppEngine?

Question

As far as I can see, GKE seems to be slighty more complex to configure and deploy an application (using Kubernetes direct files or Helm Charts or something else ?). Furthermore it seems to have no better pod failure detection or better performances ?

Why should we use GKE whereas there is GAE which only needs dispatch.yaml, app.yaml files and gcloud cli to deploy ?

Is there any technical or financial feedback against GAE ?

Finally, how can we make a choice between GKE and GAE ? What whould be the reason to not choose GAE ?

Answer 1

Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) is a cluster manager and orchestration system for running your Docker containers. Google App Engine(GAE) is basically google managed containers.

They both try to provide you similar main benefits(scalability, redundancy, rollouts, rollbacks, etc.). The main difference is in their philosophy: GKE tries to provide you very fine grained control over everything about your cluster. GAE tries to get you run your apps with as little configuration/management as possible.

With GKE you have more control, but also more work for you. You need to configure the network, security, software updates etc. With GAE you don't need to worry about many of these things, and you can focus on your app.