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  • Carl Smith
Carl Smith

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Abstract

In essence, App Engine allows you to script Google's cloud infrastructure
with Python to create Web servers.

App Engine is very simple to use compared to other cloud platforms.
Applications are generally much easier to write, to deploy and to maintain,
and they automatically scale up and down to meet demand.

The platform executes your code in a Python runtime, where you can import
most of the Python Standard Library, along with some App Engine extras that
wrap complementary services like the DataStore and the Google Account System.
You can also use packages like Django and NumPy, and you can bundle pure
Python libraries with your application.

Beyond the runtime, you have nothing at all. There is no operating system
or anything like that. There is only source code and cloud. On App Engine,
you edit your source, then hit Deploy. In less than a minute, your app is
being served from data centres with world-class security and performance,
and you are all set to scale to millions of users.

Google also provide every new application with enough free resources to
run a small (but not tiny) app forever, so every app has free hosting
until it starts to really take off.

Another nice aspect of App Engine is its gentle curve. App Engine makes it
super simple to just chuck up a script, but it is still a very advanced
system, and hosts many large and sophisticated applications.

App Engine is a really awesome platform, but engineering is all about
compromise. The rest of this post will go over a few caveats you
should keep in mind when considering App Engine for a project.