Beta release of PHP 7.2 in the Google App Engine standard environment

I feel slightly queasy :-)

The state of App Engine environments seems super confusing, but I _think_ this uses the "second generation standard environment" like the Python 3.7 and Node 8 beta environments, which means that unlike App Engine of Yore, you have access to the full package ecosystem and full network access. I'm not actually 100% sure on this because it's not listed on the runtime page (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/appengine-g...), but the docs show that you can use composer, unlike the PHP 5.5 runtime.

The documentation for all these second generation runtimes is shockingly bad. I consider Google to be _generally_ pretty good at documentation, but this is one of those cases where their propensity for confusing naming and classification of their products makes it hard as hell to figure out what is going on. It doesn't help that the top-level "product overview" page is useless marketing junk (microservices! serverless!) instead of a practical description, which is buried several links deep.

Having never used App Engine but occasionally wandering into its docs when a new product gets announced like this, am I right in assuming that App Engine's "second generation standard environment" is more or less equivalent to the feature set you'd get from Heroku? The flexible environment also continues to confuse me - it talks about being a managed Docker container, but it doesn't seem like you actually get access to anything like a Dockerfile and that's more of an implementation detail on their end.

Excuse my complete and total ignorance here - but is this essentially a 'quick deploy' php instance? if so, what might a none-Google alternative be?

I've only ever 'rolled my own', on small-scale virtual or shared servers, but I've got an upcoming project I could do with trying to install on something completely seperate - something like this might fit the bill.

Or not!

Thanks.

genius… or vendor lock-in?

AppEngine is a "Platform as a Service" although they are re-phrasing it as "serverless" these days. It has benefits like you dont have to worry about the "roll your own" side of things - you just deploy your code and it runs (Google takes care of the servers - patches, security etc).

The "killer" feature of AppEngine is the scalability - i.e. your small-scale virtual or shared servers are ok for small usage, but what happens when you have more traffic than that VPS can handle? Perhaps call the hosting provider and ask for more CPU/Mem/Bandwidth, or maybe move to a new bigger server elsewhere. But that takes time, and what if it was just a spike and now your traffic is back to normal but you've got a beast of a server running the site. You could be wasting money even with the small VPS sitting idle for most of the day if you have very infrequent traffic.

With AppEngine it just scales automatically to handle the load, from zero QPS to many thousands QPS and back down to zero again without any effort from the developer apart from the initial config (... of course you can limit that scaling too if you want to control cost).

There are also a bunch of other nice-to-have features around traffic splitting (i.e. A/B testing), some nice task-handling tools (e.g. cron-style stuff, task queues), centralised logging, and the easy plug-ins to the other Google Cloud stuff.

Deployments themselves are not especially "quick" and you have to do a few things "the appengine way", but the trade-off is you have nothing to manage on the server at all.

I've used AppEngine a lot over the past few years (mainly Java and Go) and its pretty decent I've found, although I do use a lot of the other Google Cloud services (e.g. their database stuff) so it makes sense. App Engine has been pretty rock solid in my experience.