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Google  App Engine - A Developer's Perspective

App Engine is a cloud based application Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosting and management system powered by Google's infrastructure. Google has made web applications easy to build, easy to maintain, and most importantly easy to scale. There is no server hardware to maintain and no operating systems to update. Developers can build their applications, upload it to App Engine, and you are ready to they are deployed. App Engine currently supports both the Java and Python programming languages, a scalable data store based on Big Table (the Google File System), and a full featured management system where you can view logs, setup security, and manipulate the data store.

If your application uses up to 500 MBs of storage and gets 5-million pages views a month (based on average CPU and bandwidth usage) App Engine is free.

Developing on Google's App Engine will feel very familiar to your technical staff. Your Java Enterprise Edition team will be able to hit the ground running as the development and deployment environments have been made much simpler than they may be used to.  The App Engine team has also developed a series of plug-ins for the popular open source development environment Eclipse.  This gives you a local version of the App Engine server for development as well as a plug in for quickly deploying your apps to the cloud. Command line versions of all the utilities are also included in the SDK allowing you to use your favorite editor and source code control.

When choosing a cloud based application hosting environment, your team will have to weigh the flexibility and options they need for development versus the simplicity and easy of deployment and management. Some platforms, like Amazon's AWS give you a blank slate with which you have full control, however you will need to do much more manual setup, configuration, and monitoring. Other platforms, like Microsoft's Azure, only expose a specific set of services that your application can use leaving you in a very restrictive sandbox. Google App Engine provides the perfect balance of power, control, and productivity.