60minuteswiththegeeks

Here comes Google App Engine

Have you heard about Amazon S3 or EC2? Well if you have, understanding what Google App Engine is trivial. You can view Google App Engine as Amazon S3, EC2 and more all combined together.

Google is reputed to have one of the largest installations of computers worldwide. According to the Google Story (David A. Vise), Google has over 200,000 computers and I’m sure that number would have greatly increased.One of the measurements of success of a web application is by the number of people using the application and as the number of people using the application increases, the more the load on the web application - then you start considering issues like scalability. You have to buy more servers, change the architecture, optimize database, optimize code and so on and so forth. A lot of times, the last step of scalability involves hardware.With Google App Engine, you do not have to worry about hardware scaling of your applications. As you need more storage, you just make a request for it and it’s provided - same goes for processing power. You can view your application as having the ability to scale across hundreds, if not thousands of computers as it grows.What about storage? When you were creating your application, your projections were that you will require only 1GB of storage but as your application became popular and many people were using it, you saw that you were going to need more than that. It can be a pain if you have to migrate your application to another server because you can request more space than is available. Services like Amazon S3 in the past were the only solution but with Google App Engine, Bigtable and GFS are storage solutions that can scale as needed.If you thought Google was very fast, now you have the ability to make your applications as fast. With Google App Engine, all your web app computing desires are brought to fulfilment.We at 60minuteswiththegeeks are excited about this new development from Google and can’t wait to get our hands dirty cranking out an app. Oh did we mention that Google is currently offering free services on the platform? We promise to keep you up to date on new developments with the Google App Engine.Here are other features we might not have mentioned already:

• Dynamic web serving, with full support of common web technologies (currently only Python is being provided with support for others coming soon)
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable (database) and GFS (storage) with queries, sorting and transactions - uhm sweet!)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

The preview version of Google App Engine was available for the first 10,000 developers who signed up; however, that capacity has already been exeeded although you could still sign up to get notified when other invites are available.For the preview version, applications are initially limited to 500MB of storage, 2000 emails per day, 200 million megacycles of CPU per day and 10GB of bandwidth per day.To create an application for the platform, you will need to use the SDK which is available for free download. A discussion group has also been set up where you can give feedback and ask questions relating to the platform.Why is this important?Have you noticed that every year when students are about either registering to take JAMB exams or to check their results, the site tends to be slow? This is most likely, a scaling problem and if the developers of the application built it to scale - using a platform like this for example, we would ease the frustration a lot of students go through when registering or checking their results.This is new technology and we do hope you take the plunge to understand how it works and build applications for it.