Creating Google App Engine

In the last lesson, we looked at the Cloud Run hello world deployment. As it is a managed service we just had to focus on packaging our code correctly and then it is piece of cake to deploy it.

In this lesson, we will learn about one more serverless platform App Engine. This is a managed environment for developers who wanted to deploy code from their IDE itself. Google launched the App engine in 2008 at that time it was a great tool for developers to have a one-click deployment thing. So, we will take a brief look at App Engine.

Introduction

App Engine is totally focused platform for application development over HTTP/HTTPS. App Engine supports application running on these protocols only. GCP launched App Engine as its first cloud product in 2008. Also, remember you can have only one App Engine per project.

App Engine is “Platform As A Service” offering from GCP. You can create/code web applications using GCP’s App Engine and don’t have to manage the infrastructure for hosting it on GCP. Let’s talk about the different features it has.

Functionalities

App Engine provides many application development functionalities which are required for web development or mobile backend development.

• Application Versioning: App engine maintains different versions of your app.

• Traffic Splitting: You can split traffic to different versions of your application to test it with targeted users. Use --no-promote flag while deploying. This will ensure that the traffic is not forwarded to the latest code and then you can use split traffic feature to do canary testing.

• Caching: App Engine has inbuilt support for caching static assets.

• Local dev server: A local dev server is just one command away.

With the App Engine, you pay only for what you use. No additional or maintenance cost is charged.

Keep in mind that, When you use App Engine Google’s NoSQL database Datastore (Now Firestore) is the prefered choice for the app engine database.