A brief overview of the Google App Engine pros and cons.

1. Google App Engine:
The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly
http://www.debugmodeon.com

2. What is Google App
Engine?
• A platform for running webapps on top of the
Google Infraestructure
• BigTable for storage and persistence
• APIs for authentication with google domains
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Python or Java (or any language that runs on the
Java Virtual Machine: Groovy, Scala, Jython, JRuby,
PHP over Quercus,...)

3. The Good:
easy & cheap
• Forget system administration
• High availability, automatic scaling and load
balancing
• As cheap as free in most cases
• 5.000.000 pageviews/month for free
• 10GB transference/day for free

4. The Bad:
some big limitations
• No text search (FULLTEXT)
• No threads. But you don’t need them
• No sockets. URLfetch API for web services
• No file storage
• Strong quotas: 1000 files per application,
maximum entity size 1Mb, 30 concurrent
connections,...

5. The Ugly:
you are in a blackbox
• Vendor lock-in: propietary API with the Python
runtime, less vendor lock-in in Java (applications
are standard JavaEE)
• Not mature enough (1yo). Still a preview release
• Some problems fixed in the past appear in the
future
• No easy way to backup your data

6. Our conclusion
Google App Engine is the best
choice if your application doesn’t
bother the limitations.