Google App Engine provides you a ready to use environment to build and host web applications. The hosting environment is secure and made highly available by the google’s cloud computing infrastructure.
While GAE provides you such a strong platform to build and host web applications, it has it’s own limitations as well. While Google’s infrastructure gives you abundant computing power but not the case with storage which you would expect if you are developing web applications which require a large amount of flexible secondary storage as well, for that even the applications requiring moderate amount of secondary storage to store the files.
Coming to the actual point, GAE has a limitation of allowing applications to store not more than 10MB of a single large file on it’s server. This may not be a problem for some of the web applications. This is a serious issue for many web applications which assume sufficiently large underlying storage, given these days secondary storage is available in abundance at cheap rates. Some of the developers and users are shying away from using GAE as a platform for their web application development and hosting only because of this reason. And to make life hard google does not have a paid service either to work around this issue.
What are these web application developers supposed to do? Switch to something else which offers sufficient storage along with computing power. The other better options available are Amazon EC2 and VPS. Give me a break. Why do we want to run away from the problem? Well, look around. Amazing Amazon is there to help you out. We need to think creatively and be selective when making decisions about technology these days. There are a bunch of technologies lying around. It is just a matter of selecting and integrating the two technologies and using them to satisfy needs. I am not trying to promote any specific cloud here, but to highlight the fact that GAE and Amazon S3 work really well. And it turns out to be a cost effective solution.
GAE provides the development and hosting platform for you web applications at free of cost while Amazon S3 provides you reliable, powerful and abundant storage at cheaper rates. GAE and Amazon S3 together can do wonders.
Enough of theory, let me explain it to you with a practical example.
We, at BYGSoft, had a requirement to develop a web application for one of our clients. It was a simple web application which will work as a download portal for it’s customers. We chose GAE as a development and hosting platform for web application and Amazon S3 as the back end storage.
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BYGSoft Technologies 