Intro to App Engine and Cloud Computing

Wesley Chung is an engineer, writer, teacher, and was one of the original engineers who built Yahoo! mail. He stopped by our monthly GDG meetup to give everyone an introduction to Google App Engine and cloud platform.

Cloud Platform

Google got involved in cloud computing out of necessity. Google's search index last year exceeded 100 petabytes (100 million gigabytes). Roughly 4 days of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. We don't know what percentage of that is cat videos.

The cloud technologies Google provides for you to use is an extension of the work they did tackling those internal problems. App Engine, Compute Engine, platform as a service. There are three pillars to their offerings: the compute side, storage, and application services. These combine to give you a platform to deploy your application without the usual worries of load balancing, availability, operating system, and all the little details that typically take up your time to bring your application to deployment worldwide.

Even better, the cloud platform provides APIs for networking functions that usually require extensive configuration, like email, database access, URL feeds, cloud storage, authentication, etc etc etc.

You get a full featured administrative console with too many features to list here. You'll have to explore it yourself. It's impressive.

App Engine

App Engine serves 7.5 billion page views every day. That's a "very googley" number.

Buddy Poke is a cutesy app that's been around almost as long as App Engine itself and is a good example of long term scaling, both in terms of registered users and daily use.

Gigya builds apps for special events, which is an example of short term scaling. Traffic spikes before and during the event, then dies off.

The royal wedding (Will & Kate) blog was hosted on App Engine. 32,000 users were hitting this app every second, peaking at 42kqps (kilo queries per second) when the royal couple kissed. You might call this "Royal Scaling."

This really tested App Engine's scalability

There are samples and tutorials available for web and mobile apps on App Engine, and a showcase of what other developers have built. There is a free tier if you want to try it (it only starts to cost money when you start to get significant traffic; by that point I hope you're making some money off your app), and don't worry about vendor lock-in. You can always move your application to another platform if you want.

Getting Started

You can play around with app engine on a web based SDK (no download required) at the Cloud Playground. Follow the link, clone one of the sample projects, and try it out.

Cloud Platform - Bringing it all Together

App Engine is the gateway to all other Google cloud services: databases (MySQL compatible and NoSQL), Google Translate, BigQuery, Google Prediction API, on demand virtual machines (RHEL/CentOS, Debian), local persistent storage, public cloud storage, there's even a REST API to create and manage VMs. Of course you can incorporate all the other Google APIs into your applications. Read more at the Cloud Platform Blog. 

That's all for this month. Thanks to everyone who attended and watched the talk on our YouTube channel. Happy hacking!