Ruby support comes to App Engine standard environment
Morgan Hallmon
Product Manager
We have some exciting news for App Engine customers. Ruby is now Beta on App Engine standard environment, in addition to being available on the App Engine flexible environment. Let's dive into what that means if you’re a technical practitioner running your apps on Google Cloud.
There are lots of technical reasons to choose App Engine standard vs. flexible environment (this link explains it if you are curious), but at a high level, App Engine standard environment brings a number of benefits to developers. For many users the most noticeable change is a decrease in deployment time from 4-7 minutes on App Engine flexible environment down to 1-3 minutes on App Engine standard. App Engine standard environment also supports scale-to-zero so you don't have to pay for your website when no one is using it. Finally, start-up time for new instances is measured in seconds rather than minutes—App Engine standard environment is simply more responsive to changes in load.
Scale-to-zero has its advantages in terms of cost, but it also means that you’ll want a truly serverless background processing architecture. For that, Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Tasks are great solutions for handling background tasks, and they also operate on a pay-per-use model.
We expect most Ruby developers to choose App Engine standard environment over App Engine flexible environment. The faster deployment time and scale-to-zero features are a huge benefit to most development processes. And deploying an existing Rails app to App Engine standard environment is pretty straightforward. But as they say, your mileage may vary. Look at the pros and cons in our documentation to choose the right App Engine for your Ruby applications.
