Businesses innovate and scale faster on Google App Engine

Posted by Gregory D'alesandre, Sr. Product Manager, Google App Engine team

It was another exciting year at Google I/O for Google App Engine, with more than a dozen businesses participating in the Developer Sandbox showcasing the innovative apps they are building on Google App Engine. We had a chance to hear feedback from our customers on our new version of App Engine, our future plans and our new pricing model. People were excited about the changes and eager to share with us how important App Engine has been to their businesses.

In the Sandbox, we took some time to catch up with Dan Murray, founder and managing director at WebFilings, to learn how building on App Engine has given them the speed, reliability and scale to secure major Fortune 500 clients including Valero, eBay, United Airlines, and Dish Network.



We also talked with Jessica Stanton from Evite about how it leveraged App Engine to build a technology that serves billions of pageviews a month. Evite did all of this with a team of only five developers, something it couldn't have done without the easy management and scalability App Engine provides.



And finally we heard from Gary Koelling from Best Buy, who explained to us:

“Our experience with Google App Engine really changed how we do things. We can use far fewer developers, and we don’t have to spend any time doing system administration or setting up servers, which allows us to focus on the development and testing new ideas.”

Google App Engine was discussed in more than 24 sessions at I/O this year, all of which you can view on the Google I/O site. If you’re interested in reading more about App Engine from the people who built it, check out our I/O recap post on the App Engine blog. We look forward continuing to improve App Engine for businesses and have an exciting year ahead.

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Google App Engine - a new version and a preview of future plans

Posted by Greg D’Alesandre, Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

Editors note: Today we’re at Google I/O, and we have a few announcements about how we’re making our developer tools more available and better for businesses. The first, below, summarizes important improvements to Google App Engine.

Google App Engine, which provides the ability to develop and host applications on Google’s infrastructure, has gained momentum quickly since it launched as preview status in 2008. More than 100,000 developers use App Engine every month to deliver apps that dynamically scale with usage without the need to manage hardware or software. App Engine now hosts more than 200,000 active apps that serve over 1.5 billion site views daily.

Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help them is to graduate App Engine from preview status. When App Engine graduates from preview status, which we expect to do in the second half of this year, we’ll add additional enterprise-grade features that allow us to support many more business application scenarios. Graduation from preview status also indicates Google's a longer term commitment to the product and establishes a deprecation policy whereby we will support prior versions of product APIs for a guaranteed amount of time, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to functioning.

Today, we’re moving forward with our business focus with the release of App Engine 1.5.0 which includes Backends, improved Task Queues, and more:

• With Backends, App Engine can now support applications that require long running and high memory processes. This feature allows for new classes of applications such as report generation apps and custom search engines to be hosted on the platform.
• The improvements to Task Queues allows for applications to control how tasks are executed and easily share the work using the new REST-based APIs. This API access expands App Engine’s compatibility with other on-premise and cloud services, furthering our commitment to an open development platform.

In addition, when we take App Engine out of preview in the second half of this year, we will provide a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, offline billing, and a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses. We will also introduce a new billing structure for App Engine based on more transparent usage-based pricing.

We’re announcing these features and pricing changes in advance so that our customers have time to review. Adding business features will help App Engine meet a broader set of needs and the new, more transparent pricing model will help customers better align their App Engine investment with their business goals. Learn more about these changes on the App Engine Blog.

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