How to Build, Manage & Run Your Business Applications on Google’s Infrastructure
Christian Schalk – Developer Advocate, Google

• not really an advocacy position
• still in engineering, but work a lot more with users directly
• go out to companies to help them be successful

What is cloud computing?

• lots of different definitions
• pyramid of (bottom up): 
  • infrastructure as a service 
    • joyent, rackspace, vmware, amazon web services
    • provides cooling, power, networking
  • application platform as a service 
    • GAE falls in this category
    • tools to build apps
  • software as a service 
    • google docs, etc.

GAE

• easy to build
• easy to maintain
• easy to scale 
  • appengine resides in google’s overall infrastructure so will scale up as needed
• started with only python
• with java support, opened the doors for java enterprise developers

By the Numbers

• launched in 2008
• 250,000 developers
• 100,000+ apps
• 500M+ daily pageviews 
  • 19,000 queries per second — has almost doubled since January

Some Partners

• best buy
• socialwok
• xylabs
• ebay
• android developer challenge
• forbes
• buddypoke 
  • 62 million users
• gigya 
  • do social integration for large media events (movie launches, sports events) — huge spikes in traffic so GAE just handles it
• ubisoft
• google lab
• ilike
• walk score
• gigapan
• others
• point here is it’s very easy to drop specific apps on GAE without running litearlly everything on GAE
• very popular among social networking apps because of easy scalability

Why App Engine?

• managing everything is hard
• diy hosting means hidden costs 
  • idle capacity
  • software patches & upgrades
  • license fees
• “cloud development in a box”

App Engine Details

• collection of services 
  • memcache, datastore, url fetch, mail, xmpp, task queue, images, blobstore, user service
• ensuring portability — follows java standards 
  • servlets -> webapp container
  • jdo/jpa -> datasource api
  • java.net.URL -> URL fetch
  • javax.mail -> Mail API
  • javax.cache -> memcache
• extended language support through jvm 
  • java, scala, jruby, groovy, quercus (php), javascript (rhino)
• always free to get started
• liberal quotas for free applications 
  • 5M pageviews/month
  • 6.5 CPU hours/day

Application Platform Management

• download and install SDK 
  • Eclipse plugin also available
• build app and then deploy to the public GAE servers
• app engine dashboard
• app engine health history 
  • shows status of each service individually across GAE as a whole

Tools

• google app engine launcher for python
• sdk console 
  • local version of the app engine dashboard
• google plugin for eclipse 
  • wizard for building new app engine apps
  • can run the entire gae environment locally within eclipse
  • easy deployment to app engine servers
  • in process of building a new version of this with more features

Continuously Evolving

• aggressive schedule for providing new features
• may 2010 — app engine for business announced

What’s New?

• multi-tenant apps with namespace API
• high performance image serving
• openid/oauth integration
• custom error pages
• increased quotas
• app.yaml now usable in java apps
• can pause task queues
• dashboard graphs now show 30 days
• more — see http://googleappengine.blogpost.com

Getting Started

• go to http://code.google.com/appengine for basic information
• can link gmail account to appengine
• download sdk and optionally the eclipse plugin
• http://appengine.google.com is the url for the actual service 
  • log in here with google account and create new applications

Creating and Deploying an App

• demoing eclipse plugin
• can create a new Google Web Application, optionally with GWT
• projects follow the typical java webapp structure
• before deployment, can test/debug locally just like any Java project in eclipse
• even the datastore is available locally for development/testing
• new features tend to be introduced in python first, then java gets them later
• to deploy, right click the project, choose “google,” then deploy 
  • this brings up a window where you put in your application ID and version, then uploads to the GAE servers
• can log into GAE dashboard and configure billing with maximum charges if your app will exceed the free quotas
• can use your own custom domains, this ties into google apps
• can assign additional developers to GAE applications by email address
• can deploy new versions of applications and keep the old ones as well, can toggle between versions and choose one as default

What about business applications?

• GAE for Business
• same scalable cloud hosting platform, but designed for the enterprise
• not production quite yet
• enterprise application management 
  • centralized domain console (preview available today)
• enterprise reliability and support 
  • 99.9% SLA
  • direct support 
    • tickets tracked, phone support, etc.
• hosted SQL (preview available today) 
  • managed relational sql database in the cloud
  • doesn’t replace the datastore–available in addition to the datastore
• ssl on your domain 
  • current core product doesn’t offer this
• secure by default 
  • integrated single signon
• pricing that makes sense 
  • apps cost $8/user, up to a max of $1000 per month

Enterprise App Development With Google

• GAE for Business
• Google Apps for Business
• Google Apps Marketplace
• Firewall tunneling technology available (Secure Data Connector)

App Engine for Business Roadmap

• enterprise admin console (preview)
• direct support (preview)
• hosted sql (limited release q4 2010)
• sla (q4 2010)
• enterprise billing (q4 2010)
• custom domain ssl (2010 – 2011)

SQL Support

• can run this all locally in eclipse
• demo of spring mvc travel app running on GAE with the SQL database 
  • have to explicitly enable sessions
  • had to disable flow-managed persistence

Become an App Engine for Business Trusted Tester!

• http://bit.ly/gae4btt