• You have a great idea
• You want to get to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) quickly
• You'd like to spend your resources wisely
  • Money - your MVP need not cost the earth
  • Human - focus on creating not operating
  • Time - spend time doing rather than configuring

Assuming you want to build a web application

Non-Cloud options

• Shared hosting
• Server co-location

Cloud options

• IaaS - you have to
  • install and maintain the operating system
  • install and maintain the software stack
  • write the software
• PaaS - you have to write the software

• Google App Engine - Host your applications
• Google Compute Engine - Host your Virtual Machines
• Google Cloud Storage - Host your files
• Google Cloud SQL - Host your databases
• Google BigQuery - Analyze data
• Google Cloud Datastore - No-SQL database in the cloud
• Details at cloud.google.com

The sandbox aims to make it better for everyone

• Applications don't interfere with each other
• Applications don't rely on machine-specific resources (e.g. filesystem)

Restrictons vary per language, but generally

• No filesystem access (use Datastore to persist data)
• No opening sockets (use URLFetch to make HTTP/HTTPS requests)
• Complete a web request in < 60 seconds (return fast, use Tasks)
• No system calls

• Most basic approach
• Instances scale automatically as needed
• You pay for more instances (after your free quota)

• Multiple versions of your application
• For SSL(*), use v1-dot-myapp.appspot.com instead

• Multiple versions of your application
• You break your application into multiple modules

• Google App Engine is PaaS - you just write the application
• You have a choice of programming languages
• It's easy to get started simply
• App Engine automatically scales to meet the request demand
• You can split your application into modules for more scalability

You focus on building awesome web applications, App Engine does the rest

Always remember: developers.google.com/appengine

Four easy steps

• Step 1: Get the Google App Engine SDK
• Step 2: Write code
• Step 3: Test locally
• Step 4: Deploy to App Engine

If you're using Python or PHP, we have a Git push-to-deploy integration to help

• Scalable
  • constant performance regardless of the amount of data you have
• Highly available
  • distributed and replicated across data centers
• Eventual consistency
  • Relational Databases are always consistent
  • Datastore consistency
    • strong for entity groups (entities with same parent) (with 1 write/sec limit)
    • eventual for others

• Design for eventual consistency
• Denormalise your data
  • storage is cheap
  • store a copy of the entity rather than a reference to the entity
  • this helps decrease joins
• Entity groups write limit?
  • Use sharded counters
  • Instead of one entity parent, have many
  • write to entity groups at random - parallelize = speed
• Random keys are best (they're easier to distribute)
• If you can, use idempotent transactions
• the same transaction will have the same result if applied many times
• makes retries easier

Support differs per language

Free quota and then start paying

• URL Fetch
  • Make an HTTP/S request
  • Use normal lanuage-specific approach, e.g. java.net.URL.openStream
• Task Queues
  • Defer longer tasks
  • Task has 10 minutes to complete
• Memcache
  • Store key/value pairs in memory for quicker access
  • 1MB data limit per entry

• Users
  • Authenticate users
  • Use their Google account (incl. Google Apps accounts) or OpenID(*)
• Logs
  • Request logs - contains data about each HTTP/S request
  • Application logs - contains messages you log from your application
• Mail
  • Send mail from your application
  • Receive and process mail with your application
• Google Cloud Endpoints
  • You make an API
  • App Engine SDK creates libraries for Android, iOS, Javascript

• You have a number of database options
• Datastore scales massively
• There are loads of really useful services
• There is free quota and you pay when you exceed that

• Visit appengine.google.com
• Perform many admin functions
  • Manage applications and instances
  • View Logs
  • View Data (Datastore, Blobstore)
  • Manage versions
  • Manage Task Queues
  • View detailed quota-usage information

• Instance cost vs. Latency
  • As requests increase, App Engine adds instances as needed to control latency
  • It takes time to start an instance
  • This could increase latency
  • You can control the number of idle instances (min, max) but that would cost money

Because this is built on Google's infrastructure, these benefits are included

• Edge caching
• Pagespeed
• DoS protection
• Image serving infra
• Fast to other APIs

• It's built on Google's infrastructure (so it's awesome!)
• You get a lot included
  • Infrastructure - you focus on your app
  • Scalability - from tiny to huge
  • Choice - language, data storage, performance
  • A lot of really useful services included
  • A free quota for usage, and only pay once you exceed that
• It's free to start
• SLA covering infrastructure, datastore and search of 99.95% in a month

• The App Engine documentation
• Installing WordPress on App Engine
• A guide for App Engine Java
• A quickstart guide for App Engine PHP
• These slides