A few months ago, in one of the several YouTube videos I watch about technology and programming, I heard something like this (I couldn’t provide you the exact video):
If you want to code for the future, learn Google App Engine.
Next step was searrching for …
What is Google App Engine?
It is a platform as a service cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers. App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications—as the number of requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates more resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.
On street language, it’s an app for developers where you can publish your apps using the Google’s infrastructure. And .. the better thing is that .. it’s free, although you have also some tools you need to pay if you need more services or your app it too large …. but I’ll speak more in detail in the future.
The concept is: working in Google App Engine is working on the cloud, with advantages and widtdraw, but there are new rules to follow!
In my case, my first challenge is to know what is the cloud at first hand, because everything I have worked until now was on localhosts, or servers “well located”, on my company and outside. The case is .. I finished downloading two interesting playlists on Youtube about Google App Engine for Python, and I must recommend you Renzo Nuccitelli (in brazilian, and you can follow him at @renzonuccitelli and www.python.pro.br) and Stefano Locatti ).
Google Code Lab
I had the luck to assist to a Google Code Lab organized by @miguelcalero at coSfera.es in Córdoba, my city, where I could realize about the veracity of the first sentence of this post, and everything that Google does is offered to developers to help their life. They lend you their infrastructure, and you choose how to use it. There is a freemium part, but there is also some tools where you need to pay per use.
The speaker was Andrés Leonardo Martínez (@davilagrau), an experienced Googler who talked us about how Google is betting for the cloud, the importance of Google App Engine, tools for storage such as DataStorage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, virtual machines, ….. As you can read, a wide variety of tools for developers.
About the sesion, it was highly recommended to have a good knowledge at least about Google App Engine, one of the main feature of Google cloud computing, so apart of briging your own laptop with several tools installed (including the SDK), we were challenged to code an exercise on GAE, increasing difficulty step by step, and discovering the Google solutions to handle the problem. I also had the chance to meet several developers of my city, some of them I follow them on Twitter.
Coming back home, I was collapsed, thinking that … tomorrow I will come to reallity programming with Classic ASP, VBA routines and some Pythons scripts. At least, I am lucky because walking through the road to the cloud needs a good knowledge on Javascript and jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3, and Python, and my betting on Python is a success!
Have a nice day!