Google App Engine: An overview

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing technology has been around for quite sometime now; however, it gained traction only since 2006.

”Google's own cloud offering, the Google App Engine is an infrastructure as a service offering, where it offers stacks, services or platform on cloud,” said Rajdeep Dua, Google Developer Relations Team, while talking at Spark IT.

Google App Engine has been around for over a year now. Till date, it has built around 100k application, for companies like Forbes, Ebay, Gigya, Ubisoft, iLike, BuddyPoks, and is maintained by 250k developers and supports 250 million page views daily.

”Hosting a provision box on the cloud has several hidden costs such as idle capacity, software patches and upgrades, license fees, maintenance cost, traffic and utilization forecasting and upgrades. Whereas, Google App Engine can be built on SDK, and provides application runtime (Java and Python), hardware, networking, operating system, static file serving, fault/load balancing supports etc.,” Dua said.

It takes care of downtime, load balancing and is easy to maintain (can be used with Python and Java as well).

Moreover, unlike horizontal scaling, where it is difficult to replace a bigger box when it is down, Google App Engine supports horizontal and parallel scaling, where replacing small boxes can be done quickly at ease.

Google App Engine also has distributed memory cache – Memcache -, which is available in both Python and Java, and also features URL Fetch, User APIs (Gmails), in-built XMPP support, Task Queue and also supports all languages on Java ByteCode, such as Scala and Groovy, Dua added.