Benefits of Using Google App Engine
- Google App Engine is a ‘Platform as a Service (PaaS).’ This means that developers have access to Google Infrastructures, which includes networks, servers, storage, and other services available to host applications.
- After the deployment of an application, server side management is done by Google, so developers do not need to worry about that aspect of development.
- Provides extreme scalability, as unlimited number of users can access it. Google automatically creates new options, shares databases and expands the bandwidth when needed.
- Google Apps are sandboxed, which means greater performance, reliability and tight security. Sandbox isolates apps from the underlying operating system and, thus, protects them. It allows the distribution of web requests to other servers and provides the ability to start and stop those servers.
- Google supports JAVA (version 7 or higher), PYTHON (version 2.7 or higher), Go (experimental with limited functionality) and PHP (preview – above version 5.4) and provides their own SDK, which is supported on Linux, Mac and Windows as .zip files. The developer’s guide can be located at: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/
- All four languages have local development environments to simulate App engine authentication and email APIs for Google accounts. With them, cron jobs can be scheduled to run at specified times.
- JAVA environment is based on web technology standards, which include Servelets, WARs, JDO, JPA, jave.net, JavaMail and JCache. It is supported by plugins Eclipse IDE and Apache Maven, which make project creation, testing and deployment very easy. The environment supports other languages like JRuby, JavaScript (Rhino) and Scala, which use JVM based interpreters.
- Python SDK is developed in Python itself, thus includes the complete Python standard library. It supports popular web applications frameworks including Django. It includes rich data modeling API for data store and works with any applications that support CGI or WSGI.
- For CPU intensive tasks like image manipulation, the Go environment can be used.
- Can utilize PHP environment for integrated features of Google like TaskQueue, User Service and PageSpeed. Google Cloud SQL runs like local MySQL instance while Google Cloud Storage works like local file reads/writes. To run your PHP on Google’s cloud register for Limited Preview at: https://gaeforphp.appspot.com/register
Account Limits of Using Google App Engine
Google App Engine: Each developer account includes
- 10 applications
- 1 GB storage per application
- 5 million page views per month per application
Google App Engine: Google App interaction with other elements of the Google Cloud Platform
Google Compute Engine: App engine controls the Google Compute Engine cores, as developers can specify 1, 2, 4, or 8 virtual core instances. Each core is provided with 3.75 GB memory. Compute Engine also provides a web-facing front end. Compute Engine can spin Virtual Machines (VMs) programmatically, thus providing faster computations and efficient scaling. The same infrastructure is used by Google Search, Gmail and Ads for large scale computing needs.
Google Cloud Storage: Resources are required to host applications. Google App Engine is provided with APIs to manage assets – storing, displaying, retrieving and deleting them and also reading/writing data on flat data-sheets. Google Cloud Storage is ideal for storing the assets and data. It gives fast data access around the globe (Global Regional Hosting), with reliability and guaranteed uptime of 99.95%; it also provides backup and restore options and unlimited storage.
Google Big Query: App Engine can access the Big Query NOSQL engine using language specific APIs (JAVA, .NET, PYTHON, Go, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript and others) or with UI or REST interface. It uses the Google Big Query analysis power to analyze massive amount of data (data storage scales to more than 100TB).
Google Cloud Database Solutions: App Engine has full connectivity with both database functionality solutions. With App Engine, query can work on either of the database solutions and can work on resulting datasheets.
Google App Engine: The database solutions provided are:
- Cloud SQL – for relational databases primarily MySQL. Hosting choice is provided as EU or US with 100GB storage and 16GB RAM.
- Cloud DataStore – for non-relational databases using NOSQL. There is no charge up to 50K per read/write, 200 indexes, 1GB/month data storage.