To address this gap, in March 2014, Google released App Engine Managed Virtual Machines. Managed VMs gave App Engine the ability to run each App Engine instance on an individual Compute Engine instance. The underlying virtual machines were fully managed; developers didn't need to worry about things like security updates. Developers could still focus on the application layer, but the addition of a dedicated VM introduced much of the associated flexibility. In many ways, this was the best of both worlds.
As the platform progressed, Google introduced the App Engine flexible environment as a full-fledged, container-based alternative to the standard environment. This new flexible environment builds on and ultimately replaces ...
