Building Scalable Apps using Google App Engine

The talk will is primarily designed for users who have some web programming experience in one or more frameworks. It will show an insight of AppEngine, how to create a basic app and how to scale apps with AppEngine's Cloud environment and BigTable storage. Primary focus of the talk will remain on scalability with necessary inputs from other dimensions as well.

The talk is divided into sections as below 1. Introduction The introduction will be short and deal with the agenda of the talk, what will be discussed and what things will not be discussed. It will be a warmup and preliminary knowledge for web programming. (This will depend on the delegates present, if they are mature, this step can be skipped)

1. Building Hello World with AppEngine This will introduce Google AppEngine framework with the simplest possible application - a hello world web page.

2. The Google DataStore environment and its simple-complexity One of the many things unique to Google AppEngine is its DataStore environment which uses Google's BigTable architecture for storing all data on the cloud. It's not SQL, it's not flat file - its Bigtable and this is where the simplicity and complexity arises. A substantial weightage will be to this topic to help understand the next topic of scalability.

3. Scalability - understanding what can be done and how to do There exists a lot of confusion as to what is scalability. Is it the server that decides the scalability or the code that runs on the server? How can we achieve scalability? What is scaling up and scaling out. How can we handle multiple concurrent requests and yet maintain data concurrency. There are the things that will be dealt in this segment of the talk.

4. Discussion and Q-n-A Finally we will have a discussion and Q-n-A round on the talk above. To clear out any doubt and to create a room for further discussions

I have a solid three years of experience in software development. I have been using Google App Engine for almost two years now. I am working currently at Oxylabs Networks, Gurgaon where we use Google App Engine as a backend for most of our online social games and apps. Our apps have a huge user base and we deal with scalability issues every now and then. As an engineer, my role is to solve the scalability issues, have a consistent database and be as fast as possible in processing. My Blog is - http://codecontrol.blogspot.com where i keep writing things that amuse me on the technical as well as non technical front. I have been associated with Pune GTUG and took a couple of sessions there on Google App Engine as well. (http://blog.punegtug.org/2009/05/we-had-blast-at-pune-gtug-meet-this.html)