Confusingly enough Google Container Engine != GCE. GCE is Google Comput Engine, which doesn't abstract out much of the administration. Google Container Engine (or GKE) on the other hand does abstract out most of the administration via Kubernetes. We were recently attempting to use appengine for something but gave up due to how bad the support for Go is and migrated to GKE. It definitely isn't quite as abstracted as Appengine but it's darn close.