5/5/25, 10:52 AM The Architecture of Google App Engine( GAE) | by Alexy Pulivelil | Medium

The Architecture of Google App Engine( GAE)

2 min read · Jun 23, 2021

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Google cloud platform and major building blocks, the blocks shown are large clusters of low-cost servers.
(Courtesy of Kang Chen, Tsinghua University, China)

Google App Engine is the the typical example of PaaS. Google App Engine is for
developing and hosting web applications and these process are highly scalable. The
applications are designed to serve a multitude of users simultaneously, without
incurring a decline in overall performance. Third-party application providers can
use GAE to build cloud applications for providing services. The applications run in
data centers which is

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5/5/25, 10:52 AM The Architecture of Google App Engine( GAE) | by Alexy Pulivelil | Medium

managed by Google engineers. Inside each data center, there are thousands of
servers forming different clusters.

The building blocks of Google’s cloud computing application include the Google File
System, the MapReduce programming framework, and Big Table. With these
building blocks, Google has built many cloud applications. The above Figure shows
the overall architecture of the Google cloud infrastructure. GAE runs the user
program on Google’s infrastructure. As it is a platform running third-party
programs, application developers now do not need to worry about the maintenance
of servers. GAE can be thought of as the combination of several software
components. The frontend is an application framework which is similar to other
web application frameworks such as ASP, J2EE, and JSP. At the time of this writing,
GAE supports Python and Java programming environments. The applications can
run similar to web application containers. The frontend can be used as the dynamic
web serving infrastructure which can provide the full support of common
technologies.

Features of App Engine

1. Popular language: Users can build the application using language runtimes such
as Java, Python, C#, Ruby, PHP etc.

2. Open and flexible: Custom runtimes allow users to bring any library and
framework to App Engine by supplying a Docker container.

3. Powerful application diagnostics: Google App engine uses cloud monitoring and
cloud logging to monitor the health and performance of the app and to diagnose
and fix bugs quickly it uses cloud debugger and error reporting.

4. Application versioning: It easily hosts different versions of the app, and create
development, test, staging, and production environments.

Google App Engine is one of the earliest PaaS Model which is fully scalable and
simply a small example of how high frequency of requests can be efficiently
handled. Despite the excellent architecture, there are too much restrictions, which
makes the PaaS Model inclining towards the properties of a SaaS with too much
Lock-in. For example, PHP can not run natively on the App Engine.

Google Cloud Google App Engine Cloud Computing App Engine

Google Cloud Platform

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Written by Alexy Pulivelil

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AWS Community Builder | Google Cloud Ready Facilitator | Cloud Enthusiast | DevOps Engineer | Youtuber —
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