Choose your preferred environment
Standard environment
Application can scale to 0 instances when there is no traffic. Most cost-effective for applications that have significant periods where they are not serving traffic
Fast deployment time
Runtime image cannot be customized
Ubuntu OS
Flexible environment
No free tier. Application always has a minimum number of running instances. Most cost-effective for applications that serve traffic continuously
Longer deployment time
Runtime image can be customized
Use custom machine types to configure CPU count and memory size
Ubuntu OS
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.