Note: PHP 5 has reached end of support on January 30, 2024. Your existing PHP 5 applications will continue to run and receive traffic. However, App Engine might block re-deployment of applications that use runtimes after their end of support date. We recommend that you migrate to the latest supported version of PHP.

An Overview of App Engine

Region ID

The REGION_ID is an abbreviated code that Google assigns based on the region you select when you create your app. The code does not correspond to a country or province, even though some region IDs may appear similar to commonly used country and province codes. For apps created after February 2020, REGION_ID.r is included in App Engine URLs. For existing apps created before this date, the region ID is optional in the URL.

Learn more about region IDs.

An App Engine app is made up of a single application resource that consists of one or more services. Each service can be configured to use different runtimes and to operate with different performance settings. Within each service, you deploy versions of that service. Each version then runs within one or more instances, depending on how much traffic you configured it to handle.

Components of an application

Your App Engine app is created under your Google Cloud project when you create an application resource. The App Engine application is a top-level container that includes the service, version, and instance resources that make up your app. When you create your App Engine app, all your resources are created in the region that you choose, including your app code along with a collection of settings, credentials, and your app's metadata.

Each App Engine application includes at least one service, the default service, which can hold many versions, depending on your app's billing status. For more information, see Limits below.

The following diagram illustrates the hierarchy of an App Engine app running with multiple services. In this diagram, the app has two services that contain multiple versions, and two of those versions are actively running on multiple instances:

Hierarchy graph of an app's services, versions, and instances

Other Google Cloud services, for example Datastore, are shared across your App Engine app. For more information, see Structuring web services.

Services

Use services in App Engine to factor your large apps into logical components that can securely share App Engine features and communicate with one another. Generally, your App Engine services behave like microservices. Therefore, you can run your whole app in a single service or you can design and deploy multiple services to run as a set of microservices.

For example, an app that handles your customer requests might include separate services that each handle different tasks, such as:

API requests from mobile devices
Internal, administration-type requests
Backend processing such as billing pipelines and data analysis

Each service in App Engine consists of the source code from your app and the corresponding App Engine configuration files. The set of files that you deploy to a service represent a single version of that service and each time that you deploy to that service, you are creating additional versions within that same service.

Versions

Having multiple versions of your app within each service allows you to quickly switch between different versions of that app for rollbacks, testing, or other temporary events. You can route traffic to one or more specific versions of your app by migrating or splitting traffic.

Instances

The versions within your services run on one or more instances. By default, App Engine scales your app to match the load. Your apps will scale up the number of instances that are running to provide consistent performance, or scale down to minimize idle instances and reduces costs. For more information about instances, see How Instances are Managed.

Application requests

Each of your app's services and each of the versions within those services must have a unique name. You can then use those unique names to target and route traffic to specific resources using URLs, for example:

https://VERSION-dot-SERVICE-dot-PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com

Note that the combined length of VERSION-dot-SERVICE-dot-PROJECT_ID, where VERSION is the name of your version, SERVICE is the name of your service, and PROJECT_ID is your project ID, cannot be longer than 63 characters and cannot start or end with a hyphen. If the combined length is longer than 63 characters, you might see Error DNS address could not be found.

Incoming user requests are routed to the services or versions that are configured to handle traffic. You can also target and route requests to specific services and versions. For more information, see Handling Requests.

Logging application requests

When your application handles a request, it can also write its own logging messages to stdout and stderr. For details about your app's logs, see Writing Application Logs.

Limits

The maximum number of services and versions that you can deploy depends on your app's pricing:

Limit	Free app	Paid app
Maximum services per app	5	210
Maximum versions per app	15	210

There is also a limit to the number of instances for each service with basic or manual scaling:

Maximum instances per manual/basic scaling version
Free app	Paid app US	Paid app EU
20	25 (200 for `us-central`)	25

There is also a limit to the number of characters in the URL of your application.

Description	Limit
Maximum characters in Project URL for `VERSION-dot-SERVICE-dot-PROJECT_ID` URL	63