Python on Google App Engine

App Engine offers you a choice between two Python language environments. Both environments have the same code-centric developer workflow, scale quickly and efficiently to handle increasing demand, and enable you to use Google’s proven serving technology to build your web, mobile and IoT applications quickly and with minimal operational overhead. While the two environments have a lot in common, they differ in a few important ways.

Choose your preferred environment

Standard environment

• Lightweight Python 2.7 runtime is optimized to scale nearly instantaneously to handle huge traffic spikes.

• Does not allow native code, filesystem access or arbitrary network connections. Learn more

• Uses proprietary APIs to simplify common tasks like database access, queuing and in-memory caching.

• Most cost-effective for applications that have significant periods where they are not serving traffic.

• Python 2.7

View Docs

Flexible environment

• Full open source language runtimes.

• Use any framework, library or binary of your choice.

• Code is portable to anywhere that supports Docker containers.

• Most cost-effective for applications that serve traffic continuously.

• Python 2.7, 3.6

View Docs

Choosing an environment

You can run an App Engine application in two environments, the standard environment and the flexible environment. See a summary of differences between the two environments.

Learn more