App Engine offers you a choice between two Python language environments. Both environments have the same code-centric developer workflow, scale quickly and efficiently to handle increasing demand, and enable you to use Google's proven serving technology to build your web, mobile and IoT applications quickly and with minimal operational overhead. While the two environments have a lot in common, they differ in a few important ways.

## Choose your preferred environment

### Standard environment

- Optimized to scale nearly instantaneously to handle huge traffic spikes

- [Free tier](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing)

- Ubuntu OS

- The Python 2.7 runtime is [no longer supported](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/lifecycle/support-schedule#python).

[Read docs](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/runtime)

### Flexible environment

- Open source runtimes capable of running any framework, library, or binary

- Greater CPU and memory instance types

- Can access resources in the same Compute Engine network

- No free tier. Application always has a minimum number of running instances.
  Most cost-effective for applications that serve traffic continuously

- Ubuntu OS

[Read docs](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/python/runtime)

## 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.


[Learn more](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-environments)