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

  • Optimized to scale nearly instantaneously to handle huge traffic spikes

  • Free tier

  • The Python 2.7 runtime is not recommended because Python 2 is no longer supported by the community

  • Ubuntu OS

Python 3 docs| Python 2 docs

Flexible environment

  • Open source runtimes capable of running any framework, library, or binary

  • Greater CPU and memory instance types

  • Can access resources in the same Compute Engine network

  • No free tier. Application always has a minimum number of running instances. Most cost-effective for applications that serve traffic continuously

  • Ubuntu OS

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

Try it for yourself

If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how App Engine performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

Try App Engine free