App Engine In Cloud Computing.
App Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications at scale. It is a cloud computing platform as a service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. This application is sandboxed and runs across multiple servers. Building applications on the cloud is gaining traction as it accelerates your business opportunities while ensuring availability, security, accessibility, and scalability. However, to start with creating web applications, you would require a suitable cloud computing technology. This is where Google App Engine fits in by allowing you to build and host web applications on a fully-managed serverless platform.
Services provided by App Engine includes:
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) to build and deploy scalable applications
- Hosting facility in fully-managed data centers
- A fully-managed, flexible environment platform for managing application server and infrastructure
- Support in the form of popular development languages and developer tools
Is Google App Engine a PaaS (Platform as a Service)?
Google App Engine in cloud computing is a PaaS, Platform as a Service model, i.e., it provides a platform for developers to build scalable applications on the Google cloud platform. The best thing about GAE is its ability to manage the built applications in Google’s data centers.
This way, organizations only have one job to master — building applications on the cloud. For the rest part — the App Engine provides the platform as well as manages the applications.
Major Features of Google App Engine in Cloud Computing
Some of the prominent Google App Engine features include:
1. Collection of Development Languages and Tools
The App Engine supports numerous programming languages for developers and offers the flexibility to import libraries and frameworks through docker containers. You can develop and test an app locally using the SDK containing tools for deploying apps. Every language has its SDK and runtime.
Some of the languages offered include — Python, PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Node.Js.
2. Fully Managed
Google allows you to add your web application code to the platform while managing the infrastructure for you. The engine ensures that your web apps are secure and running and saves them from malware and threats by enabling the firewall.
3. Pay-as-you-Go
The app engine works on a pay-as-you-go model, i.e., you only pay for what you use. The app engine automatically scales up resources when the application traffic picks up and vice-versa.
4. Effective Diagnostic Services
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging helps run app scans to identify bugs. The app reporting document helps developers fix bugs on an immediate basis.
5. Traffic Splitting
The app engine automatically routes the incoming traffic to different versions of the apps as a part of A/B testing. You can plan the consecutive increments based on what version of the app works best.
What are the Benefits of Google App Engine for Websites?
Adopting the App Engine is a smart decision for your organization — it will allow you to innovate and stay valuable. Here the answer to why Google App Engine is a preferable choice for building applications:
1. All Time Availability
When you develop and deploy your web applications on the cloud, you enable remote access for your applications. Considering the impact of COVID-19 on businesses, Google App Engine is the right choice that lets the developers develop applications remotely, while the cloud service manages the infrastructure needs.
2. Ensure Faster Time to Market
For your web applications to succeed, ensuring faster time to market is imperative as the requirements are likely to change if the launch time is extended. Using Google App Engine is as easy as it can get for developers. The diverse tool repository and other functionalities ensure that the Google Cloud application development and testing time gets reduced, which, in turn, ensures faster launch time for MVP and consecutive launches.
3. Easy to Use Platform
The developers are only required to write code. With zero configuration and server management, you eliminate all the burden to manage and deploy the code. Google App Engine makes it easy to use the platform, which offers the flexibility to focus on other concurrent web applications and processes. The best part is that GAE automatically handles the traffic increase through patching, provisioning, and monitoring.
4. Diverse Set of APIs
Google App Engine has several built-in APIs and services that allow developers to build robust and feature-rich apps. These features include:
- Access to the application log
- Blobstore, serve large data objects
- Google App Engine Cloud Storage
- SSL Support
- Page Speed Services
- Google Cloud Endpoint, for mobile application
- URL Fetch API, User API, Memcache API, Channel API, XXMP API, File API
5. Increased Scalability
Scalability is synonymous with growth — an essential factor that assures success and competitive advantage. The good news is that the Google App Engine cloud development platform is automatically scalable. Whenever the traffic to the web application increases, GAE automatically scales up the resources, and vice-versa.
6. Improved Savings
With Google App Engine, you do not have to spend extra on server management of the app. The Google Cloud service is good at handling the backend process.
Also, Google App Engine pricing is flexible as the resources can scale up/down based on the app’s usage. The resources automatically scale up/down based on how the app performs in the market, thus ensuring honest pricing in the end.
7. Smart Pricing
The major concern of organizations revolves around how much does Google App Engine cost? For your convenience, Google App Engine has a daily and a monthly billing cycle, i.e.,
- Daily: You will be charged daily for the resources you use
- Monthly: All the daily charges are calculated and added to the taxes (if applicable) and debited from your payment method
Also, the App Engine has a dedicated billing dashboard, “App Engine Dashboard” to view and manage your account and subsequent billings.
Authors :
Sagar Nilgar.
Abhishek Patil.
Chaitanya Sawant.
Sahil Shah.