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I vaguely understand the difference between Google App Engine and a traditional Web Hosting service.

I do understand Google App Engine can scale for a much wider audience, thanks to not having to maintain your own hardware, handling the load-balancing, spreading the data over multiple locations, etc.

But in terms of what can be accomplished when using Python or any of the other supported languages on GAE, can't a Web Hosting service equipped with a LAMP stack (or the like) create dynamic content, store data, and render pages to the browser just the same? Is there some other content / service that developers could provide through GAE?

Examples would be very helpful.

In my mind - all I can picture is that they both serve HTML pages, CSS & JS files, images, videos, music, maybe pull data from a relational database, allow users to upload files to share, etc.

chamberlainpi
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2 Answers2

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It's all about two key issues: scalability and maintenance.

Scalability comes into play when you max out your web server, then max out your database server, then max out the cluster of database servers. With App Engine you don't have to think about it. With any other solution you have to be very good and invest a lot of time to make it to each next level.

For example, it's not easy to implement tasks queues that allow any number of front-end instances to schedule task on any number of backend instances involving data from any number of database servers. On App Engine it takes a few lines of code.

In terms of maintenance App Engine eliminates the headache of hardware failure/repair, hardware/network monitoring, OS/web server/database/etc. software updates and patches, data replication - and I only mention the key areas.

The savings can be very significant depending on the scale of your project.

Andrei Volgin
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  • Thanks for your answer, but I'm particularly asking about what GAE can serve that a web host can't. What exactly is "an App" in the context of GAE? Can it be an API, a static site, used only for AJAX requests? All of the above? Not so much about the scaling and maintenance. – chamberlainpi Jun 10 '15 at 02:34
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    @bigp it is all of those things, plus a very rich set of managed services: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/features/ – Jesse Jun 10 '15 at 02:40
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Adding to @Andrei's answer, the App Engine is all about a Platform as a Service (PAAS). For example, you wrote:

In my mind - all I can picture is that they both serve HTML pages, CSS & JS files, images, videos, music, maybe pull data from a relational database, allow users to upload files to share, etc.

And that is all you should have to think about. With App Engine, you don't have to think about which version of operating system it's running, which database version it currently has, which web server, file server, log server, memcache and task queue servers are running, and so on.

Google's engineers keep your servers up and running with the latest versions of each service, and you don't have to do a thing to upgrade or scale up. All the data is backed up in three locations automatically, and protected as thoroughly as Google protects its own data. If hackers want to try and break in, they have to go past Google's defenses first.

So all you have to think about is your code and data, and leave everything else to Google. Compared with standard Web Hosting, where you have to maintain everything yourself, it's a relief to be free from all that extra work. I know, I've done it all before myself.

Brent Washburne
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