5 CASE STUDY

01...Google App Engine

Case Study Google App Engine

Google App Engine (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine, and also used by the
acronym GAE/J) is a platform as a service (PaaS) cloud computing platform for developing
and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed
and run across multiple servers. App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications
as the number of requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates
more resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.
Google App Engine is free up to a certain level of consumed resources. Fees are charged for
additional storage, bandwidth, or instance hours required by the application. It was first
released as a preview version in April 2008, and came out of preview in September 2011.

Runtimes and frameworks

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Python, Java (and, by extension, other that it plans to support more languages in the
future,and that the Google App Engine has been writtenJVM languages such as Groovy,
JRuby, Scala, Clojure, Jython and PHP via a special ofQuercus), and Go. Google has said
Currently, the supported programming languages are version to be language independent.

Reliability and Support

All billed High-Replication Datastore App Engine applications have a 99.95% uptime SLA
Portability Concerns
Developers worry that the applications will not be portable from App Engine and fear being
locked into the technology. In response, there are a number of projects to create open-source
back-ends for the various proprietary/closed APIs of app engine, especially the datastore.
Although these projects are at various levels of maturity, none of them is at the point where
installing and running an App Engine app is as simple as it is on Googles service. AppScale
and TyphoonAE are two of the open source efforts.
AppScale can run Python, Java, and Go GAE applications on EC2 and other cloud vendors.
TyphoonAE can run python App Engine applications on any cloud that support linux
machines.
Web2py web framework offers migration between SQL Databases and Google App Engine,
however it doesnt support several App Engine-specific features such as transactions and
namespaces.

Differences with other application hosting

Compared to other scalable hosting services such as Amazon EC2, App Engine provides
more infrastructure to make it easy to write scalable applications, but can only run a limited
range of applications designed for that infrastructure.
App Engines infrastructure removes many of the system administration and development
challenges of building applications to scale to hundreds of requests per second and beyond.
Google handles deploying code to a cluster, monitoring, failover, and launching application
instances as necessary.
While other services let users install and configure nearly any *NIX compatible software,
App Engine requires developers to use only its supported languages, APIs, and frameworks.
Current APIs allow storing and retrieving data from a BigTable non-relational database;
making HTTP requests; sending e-mail; manipulating images; and caching. Existing web
applications that require a relational database will not run on App Engine without
modification.
Per-day and per-minute quotas restrict bandwidth and CPU use, number of requests served,
number of concurrent requests, and calls to the various APIs, and individual requests are
terminated if they take more than 60 seconds or return more than 32MB of data.

Differences between SQL and GQL

Google App Engines datastore has a SQL-like syntax called GQL. GQL intentionally does
not support the Join statement, because it seems to be inefficient when queries span more
than one machine. Instead, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships can be
accomplished using ReferenceProperty(). This shared-nothing approach allows disks to fail
without the system failing. Switching from a relational database to the Datastore requires a
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paradigm shift for developers when modelling their data.

Unlike a relational database the Datastore API is not relational in the SQL sense.
The Java version supports asynchronous non-blocking queries using the Twig Object
Datastore interface. This offers an alternative to using threads for parallel data processing.

Architecture
The Google App Engine (GAE) is Google`s answer to the ongoing trend of
Cloud Computing offerings within the industry. In the traditional sense, GAE
is a web application hosting service, allowing for development and
deployment of web-based applications within a pre-defined runtime
environment. Unlike other cloud-based hosting offerings such as Amazon
Web Services that operate on an IaaS level, the GAE already provides an
application infrastructure on the PaaS level. This means that the GAE
abstracts from the underlying hardware and operating system layers by
providing the hosted application with a set of application-oriented services.
While this approach is very convenient for developers of such applications,
the rationale behind the GAE is its focus on scalability and usage-based
infrastructure as well as payment.

Costs
Developing and deploying applications for the GAE is generally free of charge but restricted
to a certain amount of traffic generated by the deployed application. Once this limit is
reached within a certain time period, the application stops working. However, this limit can
be waived when switching to a billable quota where the developer can enter a maximum
budget that can be spent on an application per day. Depending on the traffic, once the free
quota is reached the application will continue to work until the maximum budget for this
day is reached. Table 1 summarizes some of the in our opinion most important quotas and
corresponding amount per unit that is charged when free resources are depleted and
additional, billable quota is desired.

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