The 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 App Engine 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 App Engine standard environment to distribute requests across multiple servers, and scaling 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:

Python

Java

Node.js

PHP

Ruby

Go

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.

The memory and CPU limits vary by runtime generation. 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.

Second gen runtimes

Second generation runtimes are: Python 3, Java 11, Node.js, PHP 7, Ruby, and Go 1.12+.

Instance Class	Memory Limit	CPU Limit	Supported Scaling Types
F1 (default)	256 MB	600 MHz	automatic
F2	512 MB	1.2 GHz	automatic
F4	1024 MB	2.4 GHz	automatic
F4_1G	2048 MB	2.4 GHz	automatic
B1	256 MB	600 MHz	manual, basic
B2 (default)	512 MB	1.2 GHz	manual, basic
B4	1024 MB	2.4 GHz	manual, basic
B4_1G	2048 MB	2.4 GHz	manual, basic
B8	2048 MB	4.8 GHz	manual, basic

First gen runtimes

First generation runtimes are: Python 2.7, Java 8, Go 1.11, and PHP 5.5.

Instance Class	Memory Limit	CPU Limit	Supported Scaling Types
F1 (default)	128 MB	600 MHz	automatic
F2	256 MB	1.2 GHz	automatic
F4	512 MB	2.4 GHz	automatic
F4_1G	1024 MB	2.4 GHz	automatic
B1	128 MB	600 MHz	manual, basic
B2 (default)	256 MB	1.2 GHz	manual, basic
B4	512 MB	2.4 GHz	manual, basic
B4_1G	1024 MB	2.4 GHz	manual, basic
B8	1024 MB	4.8 GHz	manual, basic

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 App Engine standard environment gives you 1 GB 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.