App Engine standard environment

The App Engine standard environment is based on container instances running on Google's infrastructure. Containers are preconfigured with one of several available runtimes.

The standard environment makes it easy to build and deploy an application that runs reliably even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.

Applications run in a secure, sandboxed environment, allowing the standard environment to distribute requests across multiple servers and scale servers to meet traffic demands. Your application runs within its own secure, reliable environment that is independent of the hardware, operating system, or physical location of the server.

Standard environment languages and runtimes

The standard environment supports the following languages:

Go

Java

Node.js

PHP

Python

Ruby

Instance classes

The instance class determines the amount of memory and CPU available to each instance, the amount of free quota, and the cost per hour after your app exceeds the free quota.

For all runtime generations, the memory limit includes the memory your app uses along with the memory that the runtime itself needs to run your app. The Java runtimes use more memory to run your app than other runtimes.

To override the default instance class, use the instance_class setting in your app's app.yaml file.

Instance Class	Memory Limit	CPU Limit	Supported Scaling Types
F1 (default)	384 MB	600 MHz	automatic
F2	768 MB	1.2 GHz	automatic
F4	1536 MB	2.4 GHz	automatic
F4_1G	3072 MB	2.4 GHz	automatic
B1	384 MB	600 MHz	manual, basic
B2 (default)	768 MB	1.2 GHz	manual, basic
B4	1536 MB	2.4 GHz	manual, basic
B4_1G	3072 MB	2.4 GHz	manual, basic
B8	3072 MB	4.8 GHz	manual, basic

The CPU values and limits reported in the instance class table don't reflect a fixed clock speed in the CPU. Instead, they represent the instance's allocated relative compute power or performance tier on the shared-core instance type.

System tools might report the total physical memory of the underlying host machine. This is different from the instance's enforced memory limit, which is the maximum memory available to the instance's isolated sandbox environment. Exceeding this "Memory Limit", not the host's total RAM, might cause performance issues.

Important: When you view your bill, you will not see the names of the individual instance classes in your billing line items. Instead, you see instance hours from the "B" classes reported as "Backend Instances", and instance hours from the "F" classes reported as "Frontend Instances". The bill will apply the appropriate multiple of instance hours for each instance class you use. For example, if you use an F4 instance for one hour, you see "Frontend Instance" billing for four instance hours at the F1 rate.

Quotas and limits

The standard environment gives you 1 GiB of data storage and traffic for free, which can be increased by enabling paid applications. However, some features impose limits unrelated to quotas to protect the stability of the system. For more details on quotas, including how you can edit them to suit your needs, see Quotas.

Try it for yourself

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