Google App Engine

Google Apps Engine is a their online software development platform which is a paid service though you can sign up for free trial using a credit card to verify your identity. They don't charge you at the end of the trial unless you're completely ready to proceed with their service. Google Apps Engine is basically a platform as a service. And it plays well with their infrastructure as a service offerings. Google is legendary for their reliability so you know the infrastructure and platform when you begin your build are world class. Their are several hundred Android service bindings available from 3rd parties or Google which is great. The autoscaling feature is one of the main reasons to consider Google Apps Engine. You just know that the cloud infrastructure will grow with you seamlessly and the scaling option are very customizable too. No need to take care of any hardware at all. It's really amazing you can just upload your app and they take care of the heavy lifting. It also integrates with InteliJ and Eclipse to further extend your build. Having a main admin console as your central interface is another beneficial feature as well. Google Apps Engine makes it much simpler to manage the core of your platform and infrastructure. Everything is well documented too which is another reason to do business with one of the world's largest technology companies. They have the team and resources to do much and lay everything out in such detail that end users can help themselves. Google Apps Engine is a well developed PAAS. The community is vibrant and the eco-system has grown a lot so it's great to have this knowledge and a lot case studies available to overcome your challenges and make sure you're on track. This PAAS makes it as simple as possible to build and maintain your apps. And you know when they grow Google has this covered. It's a relief to have the best take care of your app platform and infrastructure requirements. Apps can be written using several popular coding languages which is good news. Makes it cost effective to get coding done because Java, Python and PHP are very familiar. Though Go code is not it's still relatively manageable. There are several other features worth looking at when consider this PAAS like the persistent storage, asynchronous task queues, sandbox environment and especially the integration with other cloud based Google services and API's which makes this a powerful PAAS.

It's important to do your research to know if Google is the best fit. There are a lot of alternatives to consider including Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine and Pivotal CloudFoundary. Google Apps Engine may not be the best for you in that your portability is less for the application code because of proprietary access to their service and modified libraries.

The beauty of using a cloud based PAAS in my opinion is the auto-scaling. The reliability provided by a company like Google brings such a peace of mind. But the documentation, ecosystem, extensibility and the pricing is considered very reasonable considering the amount of headaches a world class platform and infrastructure are able to prevent. And the time saved from maintenance and upgrades for all the hardware which used to be a pre-requisite for any sort of application deployment not too long ago.