Chapter 11. App Engine: fully managed applications
This chapter covers
- What is App Engine, and when is it a good fit?
- Building an application using the Standard and Flex versions
- Managing how your applications scale up and down
- Using App Engine Standard’s managed services
As you’ve learned, there are many available computing platforms, representing a large variety in terms of complexity, flexibility, and performance. Whereas Compute Engine was an example of low-level infrastructure (a VM), App Engine is a fully managed cloud computing environment that aims to consolidate all of the work needed when deploying and running your applications. In addition to being able to run code as you would on a VM, App Engine offers several services that come in handy when building applications.
For example, if you had a to-do list application that required storing lists of work you needed to finish, it wouldn’t be unusual for you to need to store some data, send emails, or schedule a background job every day (like recomputing your to-do list completion rate). Typically, you’d need to do all of this yourself by turning on a database, signing up for an email sending service, running a queuing system like RabbitMQ, and relying on Linux’s cron service to coordinate it all. App Engine offers a suite of hosted services to do this so you don’t have to manage it yourself.