A common aspect of building cloud-native applications is externalizing application configuration. This decouples services from their execution environment, making them more portable across platforms and lifecycles. Additionally, there is a security need to externalize application secrets such as API keys and passwords, as storing these values in unsecured plain text represents a significant vulnerability.
Google Cloud offers a wide variety of tools and services for managing application configuration. Some of these tools are specific to App Engine, while others are more broadly available to the platform as a whole. The flexibility, complexity, and overall security of each approach varies. Developers will need to determine which solution is best for their specific needs.