Enable the development team to build an API while minimizing infrastructure/framework effort. Which approach do you recommend?

The correct approach is to use Google App Engine with Google Cloud Endpoints. App Engine provides a fully managed platform, minimizing infrastructure effort for the development team. Cloud Endpoints simplifies API development, deployment, and management, offering features like authentication, monitoring, and logging, which are crucial for APIs exposed to external parties like dealers and partners. Using App Engine with JAX-RS or Swagger/OpenAPI frameworks directly would require more manual configuration and management of the API gateway aspects, increasing development effort compared to Cloud Endpoints. Using Google Container Engine (now Google Kubernetes Engine) with Django or Tomcat, while powerful, introduces more operational overhead for managing containers and Kubernetes clusters, which contradicts the goal of minimizing infrastructure effort. App Engine's serverless nature is a better fit for this requirement.