Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

More control over the infrastructure

In the flexible environment, each service is packaged as a Docker image. App Engine runs services as containers based on these images, each running in a dedicated Compute Engine VM. This provides developers with three levels of infrastructure to manage applications—the application layer, the container layer, and the underlying virtual machine.

At the application layer, services can be managed through the traditional App Engine API, similar to the standard environment. This layer provides simple methods for managing scaling, stopping and starting services, and managing traffic allocation. For applications running in the standard environment, this is largely where control ends.

Below the application layer, ...