Google App Engine: What Is It Good For?

As a developer, I'm enthusiastic about cloud computing platforms because they let me spend more time writing web applications and services and less time dealing with scalability and deployment issues. In particular, Google App Engine offers automatic scaling and potential cost savings if you design the applications to run on it with the proper discipline.
In this article, I provide an overview of the Google Apps Engine platform for developers. Along the way, I offer some tips for writing scalable and efficient Google App Engine applications.

Google App Engine Overview

I use Google App Engine for several of my own projects but I have not yet used it on any customer projects. Google engineers use Google App Engine to develop and deploy both internal and public web applications. As you will see, designing applications to run on Google App Engine takes some discipline.

The Datastore and App Efficiency and Scalability

The non-relational datastore for Google App Engine is based on Google's Bigtable system for storing and retrieving structured data. Bigtable can store petabyte-sized data collections, and Google uses Bigtable internally for web indexing and as data storage for user facing applications like Google Docs, Google Finance, etc. Bigtable is built on top of the distributed Google File System (GFS). As a developer using Google App Engine, you can also create very large datastores.
The datastore uses a structured data model, and the unit of storage for this model is called an entity. The datastore is hierarchical, which provides a way to cluster data or to manage "contains" type relationships. The way this works is fairly simple: each entity has a (primary) key and an entity group. For a top-level entity, the entity group will simply be the (primary) key. For example, if I have a kind of entity (think of this as being a type or a class) called a Magazine, I might have an entity representing an issue of this magazine identified with a key value of /Magazine:programingillustrated0101 and the entity group value would be the same as the key. I might have another entity that is an article of kind Article that might have an entity group of /Magazine:programingillustrated0101 and a key of /Magazine:programingillustrated0101/Article:10234518. Thus, you know that this article belongs to this issue of the magazine.
Entity groups also define those entities that can be updated atomically in a transaction. There is no schema for entities; you might have two entities of kind Article that have different properties. As an example, a second article might have an additional property relatedarticle that the first article does not have. The datastore also naturally supports multiple values of any property.
The primary technique for making your Google App Engine applications efficient and scalable is to rely on the datastore—rather than your application code—to sort and filter data. The next most important technique is effectively caching data for HTTP requests, which can be reused until the data becomes "stale."