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Discussion on: Cloud Run vs App Engine: a head-to-head comparison using facts and science

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ashishlogmaster profile image
Ashish “Logmaster” Boston

Your app-engine was setup to "autoscale" hence the instance would stay up constantly costing you $. If you changed it to "basic" auto-scaling, GAE would have auto scale down and stop the instance and costs should be similar to cloud run. Could you pls re-test with this setting so its a more fair comparison. Thanks,
cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/st...

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msl00 profile image
msl00 • Edited

The linked documentation could be more clear, but it is not correct to say that "autoscaled" instances are "up constantly costing you $". You linked to the "Instance State" section, and it is saying that "autoscaled" instances will only ever show as being in the "running" state (vs the "stopped" state possible for "manual" or "basic" scaling). This is because "autoscaled" instances are shut down after some time (if no requests come in), not that the instances are running 24/7.

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confiq profile image
Igor Konforti

I have to agree with @msl00 here! It's unclear and AFAIK AppEngine can NOT auto-scale to 0!

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vajahath7 profile image
Vajahath

App engine standard environment can scale down to zero. I'm paying zero for for my hobby project. cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/th...

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vugar005 profile image
Vugar

The problem with autoscaling to 0 is that it causes cold start. Assume your app is idle state(usually after 20 minutes when no new requests coming) so the total number of instance would be 0. So it take about 10 seconds to start the server in AppEngine for a first request.