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The Ultimate Guide To Google App Engine

App dev | feature highlight | google cloud.

Dheeraj Panyam

We live in a world of viral marketing where popularity is swift and fleeting. A single feature article on a popular publication or a retweet by a celebrity can bring hundreds of thousands of visitors (and potential customers) to your app or website in a single day. But chances are, as a new company, you didn’t build your server to hold 100,000 visits in an hour and those potential customers are unlikely to come back the next day.

And even if you did anticipate going viral, the 100,000 visits will still be just for a day. The next day your servers will go underutilized and paying for server space you’re not using is equivalent to losing money.

So surely, there must be a better alternative?

There is (and don’t call me Shirley).

It’s called Google App Engine.

What is Google App Engine?

Google describes App Engine as a “fully managed serverless application platform with simple administration” but let’s use an example to understand the core idea behind App Engine better.

If you’ve been using the internet long enough, you’ll probably remember Blogger – it is a blog publishing and management platform that allows users to create their own blog (similar to WordPress). Blogger had millions of active readers and hundreds of thousands and users with blogs. As a blog owner, all you had to do was log in, write your blog, and click on Post and the platform would do the rest for you.

The beauty of it all was that you could make thousands of blog posts and you wouldn’t have to worry about server space. Because Blogger had a lot of computers to keep your blog running. But the number of computers was never fixed. Every day, the number of people online would change and so would the computing power required. But this didn’t bother you or Blogger itself. Why?

Because Blogger runs on the Google Cloud Platform which scales automatically meaning Blogger would always have enough computing power to serve your blog to your readers – irrespective of the number of people online.

The Google App Engine is an extension of the Cloud Platform that allows businesses to create web apps, mobile applications, and traditional websites without having to worry about the computers that run it – you don’t think about how many computers you need or where they need to be – it’s all fully managed for you.

Features of Google App Engine

Google App Engine is one of the most feature-rich managed cloud computing programming services. In this article, we’ll take a look at just some of the most popular features of GAE. However, there are still numerous other features, many of which are unique to GAE. You can visit the official GAE page to learn more.

Editor’s note: Many of the features of Google App Engine are what attracts businesses to choose cloud computing over traditional client-server architectures. Therefore, these features also double as the benefits of Google App Engine (hence no benefits section).

Platform-as-a-service

Google App Engine is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It means that GAE bundles together all of the required components (including OS, required runtime, libraries, etc), preinstalls and configures them for you. All that is left for you to do is write and upload your code.

Compatible with popular languages

Google App Engine currently supports 6 popular languages, PHP, and custom runtimes as well. Developers can write their program in any of the following languages and directly upload it to the cloud: Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python

Built-in diagnostics tools

For a data-driven company, reliable diagnostics are crucial. With the right tools, businesses can measure all the progress and changes in revenue, traffic, user behaviour, and connect them accurately with the changes made in the codebase, giving companies the ability to see which changes are working and the ones which aren’t. You can also use these tools to identify bugs through customer feedback or software crashes.

Traditionally, high-quality diagnostics tools would have to be purchased by third-party vendors but the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has hundreds of additional services, including powerful analytics and monitoring tools (Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Debugger, Error Reporting, etc.)

Pay-per-use pricing

One of the most attractive benefits of the Google App Engine is pay-per-use pricing which means that companies only have to pay for the resources they use. This means there are no daily fixed costs if your audience only uses your services on weekends.

Highly scalable

Google App Engine is extremely scalable. You have access to the thousands of computers worth of computing power spread across the globe to avoid downtime and timeouts while ensuring low latency. And you only have this computing power when you need to avoid underutilized resources (leading to lower cloud spend).

A large services ecosystem

Google App Engine allows you to access the hundreds of additional services and tools that Google has created under its Cloud Platform (GCP) to develop some of the most advanced, optimized, and efficient conversion machines on the planet. Here are some of the areas covered by the products in the GCP ecosystem: Compute, Storage, Database, Networking, Operations, Data Analytics, AI and Machine Learning, API Management, Hybrid and multi-cloud, Migration, Security and Identity, Containers, Internet of Things (IoT), Management Tools.

In total, there are hundreds of products spanning 18 product categories. These help you break away from traditional third-party vendors and have everything you need in one place.

Use Cases of Google App Engine (with Case Studies)

Translating potential value into realized value is one of the hardest parts of adopting any new technology. To improve the process of adopting Google App Engine and to give companies a sense of direction, here are some popular and powerful use cases of Google App Engine along with case studies to further drive implementation.

Infrastructure Modernization with Google App Engine

Infrastructure includes everything from your server hardware to the software that you’re running. Most legacy businesses are often running two to three outdated components in their infrastructure which increases IT spend while at the same time reducing productivity.

There are different strategies for modernization and cloud migration (like rehosting and replatforming) that come with different costs. However, there is one infrastructure modernization strategy that is often overlooked as it focuses on just the backends of the infrastructure – App Engine.

Companies with traditional client-server infrastructure can use App Engine and no longer worry about server management or configurations before deployments. Additionally, scalability is also not a concern anymore and businesses can grow their apps with the confidence that their infrastructure won’t fail or falter under the increasing load.

Case Study: Fabsystems Modernizes their Infrastructure to Optimize Costs, Flexibility and Scalability

Fabsystems is a SaaS solution meant to help steel companies accurately and efficiently estimate their steel requirements. However, their existing infrastructure was proving to a bottleneck in the way of a fast-growing company. To cut costs, increase performance, and reduce time-to-market, Fabsystems partnered with D3V to modernize its existing software and transition to the App Engine Standard. This move resulted in increasing performance by 50%, reducing cloud spend by 30%, and introducing updates faster and more reliably. Here is the full case study .

Application Development with Google App Engine

Applications (including both web apps and mobile apps) traditionally required a lot of preparation before the actual code could be deployed. However, the App Engine offers zero-config deployments which means your developers can get straight to writing code and pushing updates.

Additional services from the Google Cloud ecosystem offer an effective platform to manage all your data and assets so that you can create modern apps with next-generation upgradability. The App Engine is also far more suitable for remote development, compared to traditional monolithic architectures.

Bottom line, companies can use App Engine to develop powerful and modern applications that are faster, efficient, and more affordable.

Traffic splitting for A/B Testing and Limited Rollouts

Traffic splitting, incremental feature rollouts, and the ability to add/remove parts of features without affecting user experience is another popular use case of the App Engine. With the microservices architecture, developers have access to isolated containers that represent features of an application. These containers can be added, modified, and completely removed from the main code base with minimal coding.

Companies use this ability to route incoming traffic to different versions of the application (for A/B testing), do incremental feature rollouts to update faster, and isolate bugs without the risk of causing a system-wide crash.

Case Study: Travlytix created an intelligent customer data platform in six months

HTC required a platform that gave its users lag-free and uninterrupted access to data and creating a customer data platform with a small team and a short deadline. They made use of the App Engine along with Google’s other managed services to create a fully functional platform based on microservices that was resilient, stable, and lag-free. You can read the full case study here .

Scaling Through Optimization

There are two methods to scale. The first method is to add more computing power so more requests can be processed at the same time. The other method is to optimize the requests so less computing power is required and thus more requests can be processed. Most companies scale with the first option which is called vertical scaling. The optimization method is often overlooked as vertical scaling is considered faster and easier – but with time, optimization becomes necessary.

Applications can be optimized through various techniques including minimizing disk reads, caching computations, or more recent techniques like multi-tenant solutions that allow businesses to scale up while reducing costs.

Getting Started with Google App Engine

Getting an application up and running on Google App Engine is relatively straightforward and can be done in just five steps:

• Create a Google App Engine account
• Set up the Google App Engine SDK
• Write a simple Google App Engine application
• Test the application locally
• Deploy the Google App Engine application in the cloud

However, things start to become more complex as your application grows and you need to utilize additional managed services to create a more feature-rich application that is still clean, fast, and resilient. In such a case, working with certified cloud engineers is usually the most rewarding option.

D3V Tech is a cloud-based solutions provider with a team of certified cloud engineers, migrations officers, and developers that can make your vision into a fully-functional cloud-based application. Schedule a free consultation today and get started with a development roadmap.

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The Ultimate Guide to Google App Engine for 2020

We live in a world of viral marketing where popularity is swift and fleeting. A single feature article on a popular publication or a retweet by a celebrity can bring hundreds of thousands of visitors (and potential customers) to your app or website in a single day. But chances are, as a new company, you didn’t build your server to hold 100,000 visits in an hour and those potential customers are unlikely to come back the next day.

And even if you did anticipate going viral, the 100,000 visits will still be just for a day. The next day your servers will go underutilized and paying for server space you’re not using is equivalent to losing money.

So surely, there must be a better alternative?

It’s called Google App Engine.

What is Google App Engine?

Google describes App Engine as a “fully managed serverless application platform with simple administration” but let’s use an example to understand the core idea behind App Engine better.

If you’ve been using the internet long enough, you’ll probably remember Blogger - it is a blog publishing and management platform that allows users to create their own blog (similar to WordPress). Blogger had millions of active readers and hundreds of thousands and users with blogs. As a blog owner, all you had to do was log in, write your blog, and click on Post and the platform would do the rest for you.

The beauty of it all was that you could make thousands of blog posts and you wouldn’t have to worry about server space. Because Blogger had a lot of computers to keep your blog running. But the number of computers was never fixed. Every day, the number of people online would change and so would the computing power required. But this didn’t bother you or Blogger itself. Why?

Because Blogger runs on the Google Cloud Platform which scales automatically meaning Blogger would always have enough computing power to serve your blog to your readers - irrespective of the number of people online.

The Google App Engine is an extension of the Cloud Platform that allows businesses to create web apps, mobile applications, and traditional websites without having to worry about the computers that run it - you don’t think about how many computers you need or where they need to be - it’s all fully managed for you.

Features of Google App Engine

Google App Engine is one of the most feature-rich managed cloud computing programming services. In this article, we’ll take a look at just some of the most popular features of GAE. However, there are still numerous other features, many of which are unique to GAE. You can visit the official GAE page to learn more.

Editor’s note: Many of the features of Google App Engine are what attracts businesses to choose cloud computing over traditional client-server architectures. Therefore, these features also double as the benefits of Google App Engine (hence no benefits section).

Platform-as-a-service

Google App Engine is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It means that GAE bundles together all of the required components (including OS, required runtime, libraries, etc), preinstalls and configures them for you. All that is left for you to do is write and upload your code.

Compatible with popular languages

Google App Engine currently supports 6 popular languages, PHP, and custom runtimes as well. Developers can write their program in any of the following languages and directly upload it to the cloud: Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python

Built-in diagnostics tools

For a data-driven company, reliable diagnostics are crucial. With the right tools, businesses can measure all the progress and changes in revenue, traffic, user behaviour, and connect them accurately with the changes made in the codebase, giving companies the ability to see which changes are working and the ones which aren’t. You can also use these tools to identify bugs through customer feedback or software crashes.

Traditionally, high-quality diagnostics tools would have to be purchased by third-party vendors but the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has hundreds of additional services, including powerful analytics and monitoring tools (Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Debugger, Error Reporting, etc.)

Pay-per-use pricing

One of the most attractive benefits of the Google App Engine is pay-per-use pricing which means that companies only have to pay for the resources they use. This means there are no daily fixed costs if your audience only uses your services on weekends.

Highly scalable

Google App Engine is extremely scalable. You have access to the thousands of computers worth of computing power spread across the globe to avoid downtime and timeouts while ensuring low latency. And you only have this computing power when you need to avoid underutilized resources (leading to lower cloud spend).

A large services ecosystem

Google App Engine allows you to access the hundreds of additional services and tools that Google has created under its Cloud Platform (GCP) to develop some of the most advanced, optimized, and efficient conversion machines on the planet. Here are some of the areas covered by the products in the GCP ecosystem: Compute, Storage, Database, Networking, Operations, Data Analytics, AI and Machine Learning, API Management, Hybrid and multi-cloud, Migration, Security and Identity, Containers, Internet of Things (IoT), Management Tools.

In total, there are hundreds of products spanning 18 product categories. These help you break away from traditional third-party vendors and have everything you need in one place.

Use Cases of Google App Engine (with Case Studies)

Translating potential value into realized value is one of the hardest parts of adopting any new technology. To improve the process of adopting Google App Engine and to give companies a sense of direction, here are some popular and powerful use cases of Google App Engine along with case studies to further drive implementation.

Infrastructure Modernization with Google App Engine

Infrastructure includes everything from your server hardware to the software that you’re running. Most legacy businesses are often running two to three outdated components in their infrastructure which increases IT spend while at the same time reducing productivity.

There are different strategies for modernization and cloud migration (like rehosting and replatforming ) that come with different costs. However, there is one infrastructure modernization strategy that is often overlooked as it focuses on just the backends of the infrastructure - App Engine.

Companies with traditional client-server infrastructure can use App Engine and no longer worry about server management or configurations before deployments. Additionally, scalability is also not a concern anymore and businesses can grow their apps with the confidence that their infrastructure won’t fail or falter under the increasing load.

Case Study: Fabsystems Modernizes their Infrastructure to Optimize Costs, Flexibility and Scalability

Fabsystems is a SaaS solution meant to help steel companies accurately and efficiently estimate their steel requirements. However, their existing infrastructure was proving to a bottleneck in the way of a fast-growing company. To cut costs, increase performance, and reduce time-to-market, Fabsystems partnered with D3V to modernize its existing software and transition to the App Engine Standard. This move resulted in increasing performance by 50%, reducing cloud spend by 30%, and introducing updates faster and more reliably. Here is the full case study .

Application Development with Google App Engine

Applications (including both web apps and mobile apps) traditionally required a lot of preparation before the actual code could be deployed. However, the App Engine offers zero-config deployments which means your developers can get straight to writing code and pushing updates.

Additional services from the Google Cloud ecosystem offer an effective platform to manage all your data and assets so that you can create modern apps with next-generation upgradability. The App Engine is also far more suitable for remote development, compared to traditional monolithic architectures.

Bottom line, companies can use App Engine to develop powerful and modern applications that are faster, efficient, and more affordable.

Traffic splitting for A/B Testing and Limited Rollouts

Traffic splitting, incremental feature rollouts, and the ability to add/remove parts of features without affecting user experience is another popular use case of the App Engine. With the microservices architecture, developers have access to isolated containers that represent features of an application. These containers can be added, modified, and completely removed from the main code base with minimal coding.

Companies use this ability to route incoming traffic to different versions of the application (for A/B testing), do incremental feature rollouts to update faster, and isolate bugs without the risk of causing a system-wide crash.

Case Study: Travlytix created an intelligent customer data platform in six months

HTC required a platform that gave its users lag-free and uninterrupted access to data and creating a customer data platform with a small team and a short deadline. They made use of the App Engine along with Google’s other managed services to create a fully functional platform based on microservices that was resilient, stable, and lag-free. You can read the full case study here.

Scaling Through Optimization

There are two methods to scale. The first method is to add more computing power so more requests can be processed at the same time. The other method is to optimize the requests so less computing power is required and thus more requests can be processed. Most companies scale with the first option which is called vertical scaling. The optimization method is often overlooked as vertical scaling is considered faster and easier - but with time, optimization becomes necessary.

Applications can be optimized through various techniques including minimizing disk reads, caching computations, or more recent techniques like multi-tenant solutions that allow businesses to scale up while reducing costs.

Getting Started with Google App Engine

Getting an application up and running on Google App Engine is relatively straightforward and can be done in just five steps:

Create a Google App Engine account

Set up the Google App Engine SDK

Write a simple Google App Engine application

Test the application locally

Deploy the Google App Engine application in the cloud

However, things start to become more complex as your application grows and you need to utilize additional managed services to create a more feature-rich application that is still clean, fast, and resilient. In such a case, working with certified cloud engineers is usually the most rewarding option.

D3V Tech is a cloud-based solutions provider with a team of certified cloud engineers, migrations officers, and developers that can make your vision into a fully-functional cloud-based application. Schedule a free consultation today and get started with a development roadmap.

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adi5krish / Real-Time-Face-Swapping-Tool-using-Deepfake-Algorithm

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ramuta / gae-2nd-gen-examples

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• Updated Nov 11, 2019

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Google Cloud Fundamentals: Getting Started with App Engine

Checkpoints.

Deploy the Hello World application to App Engine

• Set up your lab environment
• Task 1. Initialize App Engine
• Task 2. Run Hello World application locally
• Task 3. Deploy and run Hello World on App Engine
• Task 4. Disable the application
• Congratulations!
• End your lab

In this lab, you create and deploy a simple App Engine application using a virtual environment in the Google Cloud Shell.

In this lab, you learn how to perform the following tasks:

• Initialize App Engine.
• Preview an App Engine application running locally in Cloud Shell.
• Deploy an App Engine application, so that others can reach it.
• Disable an App Engine application, when you no longer want it to be visible.

For each lab, you get a new Google Cloud project and set of resources for a fixed time at no cost.

Sign in to Qwiklabs using an incognito window .

Note the lab's access time (for example, 1:15:00 ), and make sure you can finish within that time. There is no pause feature. You can restart if needed, but you have to start at the beginning.

When ready, click Start lab .

Note your lab credentials ( Username and Password ). You will use them to sign in to the Google Cloud Console.

Click Open Google Console .

Click Use another account and copy/paste credentials for this lab into the prompts. If you use other credentials, you'll receive errors or incur charges .

Accept the terms and skip the recovery resource page.

Activate Google Cloud Shell

Google Cloud Shell is a virtual machine that is loaded with development tools. It offers a persistent 5GB home directory and runs on the Google Cloud.

Google Cloud Shell provides command-line access to your Google Cloud resources.

In Cloud console, on the top right toolbar, click the Open Cloud Shell button.

Click Continue .

It takes a few moments to provision and connect to the environment. When you are connected, you are already authenticated, and the project is set to your PROJECT_ID . For example:

gcloud is the command-line tool for Google Cloud. It comes pre-installed on Cloud Shell and supports tab-completion.

• You can list the active account name with this command:

Example output:

• You can list the project ID with this command:

Initialize your App Engine app with your project and choose its region:

Clone the source code repository for a sample application in the hello_world directory:

Navigate to the source directory:

In this task, you run the Hello World application in a local, virtual environment in Cloud Shell.

Ensure that you are at the Cloud Shell command prompt.

Create a Dockerfile

Edit the Dockerfile [hint: nano Dockerfile ] to contain the following content.

Build a container image to run a Python virtual environment.

Run the application:

To end the test, return to Cloud Shell and press Ctrl+C to abort the deployed service.

To deploy your application to the App Engine Standard environment:

Deploy your Hello World application.

This app deploy command uses the app.yaml file to identify project configuration.

Launch your browser to view the app at http://YOUR_PROJECT_ID.appspot.com

Copy and paste the URL into a new browser window.

Congratulations! You created your first application using App Engine.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Deploy the Hello World application to App Engine

App Engine offers no option to Undeploy an application. After an application is deployed, it remains deployed, although you could instead replace the application with a simple page that says something like "not in service."

However, you can disable the application, which causes it to no longer be accessible to users.

Click Disable application .

Read the dialog message. Enter the App ID and click DISABLE .

If you refresh the browser window you used to view the application site, you'll get a 404 error.

You created your first application using App Engine!

When you have completed your lab, click End Lab . Google Cloud Skills Boost removes the resources you’ve used and cleans the account for you.

You will be given an opportunity to rate the lab experience. Select the applicable number of stars, type a comment, and then click Submit .

The number of stars indicates the following:

• 1 star = Very dissatisfied
• 2 stars = Dissatisfied
• 3 stars = Neutral
• 4 stars = Satisfied
• 5 stars = Very satisfied

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In this lab, you create a simple App Engine application using the Cloud Shell local development environment, and then deploy it to App Engine.

Duration: 1m setup · 20m access · 20m completion

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App Engine: Google's deepest secrets as a service

The software scales. but will the google rulebook.

Google will never open source its back end. You'll never run the Google File System or Google MapReduce or Google BigTable on your own servers. Except on the rarest of occasions , the company won't even discuss the famously distributed software that underpins its sweeping collection of web services.

But if you like, you can still run your own applications atop GFS and MapReduce and BigTable. With Google App Engine – the "platform cloud" the company floated in the spring of 2008 – anyone can hoist code onto Google's live infrastructure. App Engine aims to share the company's distributed computing expertise by way of an online service.

"Google has built up this infrastructure – a lot of distributed software, internal processes – for building-out and scaling applications. We don't have the luxury of slowly ramping something up: when we launch something, we have to get it out there and scale it very, very quickly," Google App Engine product manager Sean Lynch recently told The Register .

"We decided we could take a lot of this infrastructure and expose it in a way that would let third-party developers use it – leverage the knowledge and techniques we have built up – to basically simplify the entire process of building their own web apps: building them, managing them once they're up there, and scaling them once they take off."

For some coders, it's an appealing proposition, not only because the Google back end has a reputation few others can match – a reputation fueled in part by the company's reluctance to discuss particulars – but also because App Engine completely removes the need to run your own infrastructure. As a platform cloud, App Engine goes several steps beyond an "infrastructure cloud" à la Amazon EC2 . It doesn't give you raw virtual machines. It gives you APIs, and once you code to these APIs, the service takes care of the rest.

"When you're one guy trying to run a startup, you have to do absolutely everything. I've done everything from managing machines to writing code to marketing," says Jeff Schnitzer, a former senior engineer in EA's online games division who's now using App Engine to build an online-dating application. "That's one of the reasons why I've been drawn to App Engine. It eliminates entire classes of job descriptions, from sys admin to DBA."

The rub is that in order to benefit from this automation, you have to play by a strict Google rulebook. All applications must be built with Python, Java, or one of a handful of other supported languages, including Google's new-age Go programming language , which was just added to the list . And even within these languages, there are limits on the libraries and frameworks you can use, the way you handle data, and the duration of your processes.

Google is loosening some restrictions as the service matures. But inherently, App Engine requires a change of mindset. "You have to throw away a lot of what you know and basically write for Google's model: small instances, faster start, completely new data storage. It's a completely different beast," says Matt Cooper, a developer and entrepreneur who just recently started using the service. And because Google jealously guards the secrets of its infrastructure, anyone who builds an application atop App Engine will face additional hurdles if they ever decide to move the app elsewhere.

All of which makes Google App Engine a particularly fascinating case study. Much like in other markets , Google is promising you an added payoff if you seriously change the way you've done things in the past – and if you put a hefty amount of trust on its servers. Many have already embraced the proposition – App Engine serves more than a billion and a half page views a day, and 100,000 coders access the online console each month – but it's yet to be seen whether the service has a future in the mainstream.

Google App Engine

We know that Google has a knack for scaling web applications. "Google employees are very good about not talking about their proprietary [infrastructure], but they do give you qualitative feel for it," says Dwight Merriman, cofounder of MongoDB, the distributed database that seeks to solve many of the same scaling issues as the Google back end. What we don't know is whether the Google ethos can scale into the enterprise.

Google believes it can. Lynch calls App Engine a "long-term business", and later this year, the service will exit a three-year beta period, brandishing new enterprise-centric terms of service. Proof of the service's viability, the company believes, lies in the track record of the Google infrastructure. "This is a service that's a tremendous differentiator for us, " says Lynch. "We can see it being valuable for other people to use it as well."

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What is Google App Engine (GAE)?

Pre-requisite:- Google Cloud Platform

A scalable runtime environment, Google App Engine is mostly used to run Web applications. These dynamic scales as demand change over time because of Google’s vast computing infrastructure. Because it offers a secure execution environment in addition to a number of services, App Engine makes it easier to develop scalable and high-performance Web apps. Google’s applications will scale up and down in response to shifting demand. Croon tasks, communications, scalable data stores, work queues, and in-memory caching are some of these services.

The App Engine SDK facilitates the testing and professionalization of applications by emulating the production runtime environment and allowing developers to design and test applications on their own PCs. When an application is finished being produced, developers can quickly migrate it to App Engine, put in place quotas to control the cost that is generated, and make the programmer available to everyone. Python, Java, and Go are among the languages that are currently supported.

The development and hosting platform Google App Engine, which powers anything from web programming for huge enterprises to mobile apps, uses the same infrastructure as Google’s large-scale internet services. It is a fully managed PaaS (platform as a service) cloud computing platform that uses in-built services to run your apps. You can start creating almost immediately after receiving the software development kit (SDK). You may immediately access the Google app developer’s manual once you’ve chosen the language you wish to use to build your app.

After creating a Cloud account, you may Start Building your App

• Using the Go template/HTML package
• Python-based webapp2 with Jinja2
• PHP and Cloud SQL
• using Java’s Maven

The app engine runs the programmers on various servers while “sandboxing” them. The app engine allows the program to use more resources in order to handle increased demands. The app engine powers programs like Snapchat, Rovio, and Khan Academy.

Features of App Engine 

Runtimes and languages.

To create an application for an app engine, you can use Go, Java, PHP, or Python. You can develop and test an app locally using the SDK’s deployment toolkit. Each language’s SDK and nun time are unique. Your program is run in a:

• Java Run Time Environment version 7
• Python Run Time environment version 2.7
• PHP runtime’s PHP 5.4 environment
• Go runtime 1.2 environment

Generally Usable Features

These are protected by the service-level agreement and depreciation policy of the app engine. The implementation of such a feature is often stable, and any changes made to it are backward-compatible. These include communications, process management, computing, data storage, retrieval, and search, as well as app configuration and management. Features like the HRD migration tool, Google Cloud SQL, logs, datastore, dedicated Memcached, blob store, Memcached, and search are included in the categories of data storage, retrieval, and search.

Features in Preview

In a later iteration of the app engine, these functions will undoubtedly be made broadly accessible. However, because they are in the preview, their implementation may change in ways that are backward-incompatible. Sockets, MapReduce, and the Google Cloud Storage Client Library are a few of them.

Experimental Features 

These might or might not be made broadly accessible in the next app engine updates. They might be changed in ways that are irreconcilable with the past. The “trusted tester” features, however, are only accessible to a limited user base and require registration in order to utilize them. The experimental features include Prospective Search, Page Speed, OpenID, Restore/Backup/Datastore Admin, Task Queue Tagging, MapReduce, and Task Queue REST API. App metrics analytics, datastore admin/backup/restore, task queue tagging, MapReduce, task queue REST API, OAuth, prospective search, OpenID, and Page Speed are some of the experimental features.

Third-Party Services

As Google provides documentation and helper libraries to expand the capabilities of the app engine platform, your app can perform tasks that are not built into the core product you are familiar with as app engine. To do this, Google collaborates with other organizations. Along with the helper libraries, the partners frequently provide exclusive deals to app engine users.

Advantages of Google App Engine 

The Google App Engine has a lot of benefits that can help you advance your app ideas. This comprises:

• Infrastructure for Security: The Internet infrastructure that Google uses is arguably the safest in the entire world. Since the application data and code are hosted on extremely secure servers, there has rarely been any kind of illegal access to date.
• Faster Time to Market: For every organization, getting a product or service to market quickly is crucial. When it comes to quickly releasing the product, encouraging the development and maintenance of an app is essential. A firm can grow swiftly with Google Cloud App Engine’s assistance.
• Quick to Start: You don’t need to spend a lot of time prototyping or deploying the app to users because there is no hardware or product to buy and maintain.
• Easy to Use: The tools that you need to create, test, launch, and update the applications are included in Google App Engine (GAE).
• Rich set of APIs & Services: A number of built-in APIs and services in Google App Engine enable developers to create strong, feature-rich apps.
• Scalability: This is one of the deciding variables for the success of any software. When using the Google app engine to construct apps, you may access technologies like GFS, Big Table, and others that Google uses to build its own apps.
• Performance and Reliability: Among international brands, Google ranks among the top ones. Therefore, you must bear that in mind while talking about performance and reliability.
• Cost Savings: To administer your servers, you don’t need to employ engineers or even do it yourself. The money you save might be put toward developing other areas of your company.
• Platform Independence: Since the app engine platform only has a few dependencies, you can easily relocate all of your data to another environment.

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Google App Engine in Cloud Computing

Explore the world of Google App Engine in cloud computing. Uncover the fundamentals with What is Google App Engine? and gain insights into its architecture. Delve into the core features of Google App Engine and discover the compelling reasons to choose it in your cloud computing journey. Read more to get started!

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In the endless collection of online services, people are gifted with countless choices. Among them, the Google App Engine stands as a distinct service preferred by countless people. It helps in simplifying the digital journey for many, enabling seamless online experiences and reducing tech-related stress. In this blog, you will learn in detail about the Google App Engine in Cloud Computing, its key features, benefits and uses along with some useful tips.

Table of Contents

1) What is Google App Engine?

2) How is the Google App Engine used?

3) The architecture of Google App Engine

4) Core features of Google App Engine

5) What are the benefits and challenges of using Google App Engine?

6) Why choose Google App Engine in Cloud Computing?  

7) Conclusion

What is Google App Engine?

Google App Engine is a Cloud Computing service offered by Google. It enables users to create, host, and expand their applications using Google's solid and systematic infrastructure. Google App Engine accommodates a variety of programming languages, such as Python, Java, Go, PHP and several others, granting developers the freedom to select their preferred language.

A standout feature of Google App Engine is its wholly managed environment. This means it takes care of all the background tech tasks, letting developers direct all their attention to just the application they're building. Its numerous benefits like auto-scaling and uninterrupted deployment, make it a top pick for businesses aiming to enhance their Cloud operations.

Google App Engine has revolutionised resource management for e-commerce platforms during sales. Traditionally, manual resource allocation was costly and time-consuming. Google App Engine allows automatic scaling to intuitively handle traffic surges, ensuring uninterrupted service. As traffic recedes, it scales down, optimising costs and ensuring efficient operation throughout.  

How is the Google App Engine used?

Google App Engine is a serverless platform, which hosts, and allows developers to build and deploy web applications. Developers or users can create an account in Google App Engine to set up a Software Development Kit (SDK), to write the source code of applications easily.

It is also used to build scalable back end mobile applications. These are then used to adapt workloads as needed. Google App Engine can also be used for application testing where users can route traffic to different application versions.

The architecture of Google App Engine

1) Datastore: Serving as the central data management system in Cloud Computing, Google App Engine's Datastore is a NoSQL database renowned for its scalability. What sets it apart is its dynamic nature, adapting in real-time to the demands of the application. Whether it's a minor data retrieval or a massive data influx, the datastore scales on-the-fly, ensuring that data remains consistently accessible and safeguarded against potential threats.

2) Task queues: In any application, there exist tasks that don’t necessitate immediate user feedback. Google App Engine's Task queues are designed to manage such background operations. By queuing these tasks, they're executed asynchronously, optimising application performance and ensuring users aren't bogged down with processing delays.

3) Memcache : As a rapid-access in-memory caching system, Memcache plays a pivotal role in enhancing data retrieval speeds. Especially beneficial for frequently queried data, it acts as a buffer, reducing the datastore's workload. This not only ensures quicker response times but also contributes to the longevity and efficiency of the main Datastore.

4) Blobstore: In today's digital age, applications often deal with voluminous data, be it high-definition images, videos, or other large files. The Blobstore is Google App Engine's dedicated solution for such requirements. By efficiently managing and storing these large objects, it ensures that the primary datastore isn’t overwhelmed, maintaining a harmonious data ecosystem.

5) Automatic scaling: One of Google App Engine’s crowning features, Automatic Scaling, epitomises proactive resource management. By continually monitoring application traffic and user requests, it dynamically scales resources. This ensures optimal performance even during unexpected traffic surges, eliminating the need for manual adjustments and guaranteeing a consistently smooth user experience.

6) Integrated services: Google App Engine isn't an isolated entity but a cog in the vast machinery of Google Cloud Computing services. Its ability to seamlessly mesh with other services, from Data Analytics platforms to state-of-the-art Machine Learning tools, transforms it from a mere hosting platform to a comprehensive, integrated Cloud solution. This interoperability enhances the capabilities of applications hosted on Google App Engine, giving Developers a richer toolset to work with.

Interested in learning more about Google Cloud Platform? Get started with our Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals Course !

Core features of Google App Engine in Cloud Computing

Multiple language support

Google A pp Engine is adept at embracing a variety of programming languages. Whether you're fluent in Java, Python, PHP, Go, or numerous others, Google App Engine has got you covered. This multifaceted support ensures that developers aren't constrained by language limitations. Instead, they can pick and choose based on their comfort and expertise, making the development process smooth and intuitive.

Automated management

Looking deeper into Google App Engine's automated management reveals a world where manual intervention is minimised. Google App Engine takes the reins when it comes to managing applications. From maintaining the core infrastructure to adeptly routing traffic, overseeing software patches, and ensuring a robust failover system, this tool does it all. For Developers and businesses, this translates to a significant reduction in operational intricacies and the hours usually spent on infrastructure oversight.

Scalability

Google App Engine has a one of a kind scalability feature. Imagine an application that intelligently scales up or down in response to the ebb and flow of user traffic, ensuring consistent performance without manual tweaks. Google App Engine's automatic scaling discerns the needs of the application based on traffic and usage patterns, empowering it to handle even unexpected surges in demand effortlessly.

Integrated environment

The synergy between various Google Cloud Computing services is palpable when you use Google App Engine. A harmonious integration with platforms like Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage , and Google Workspace paves the way for a holistic development environment. This not only streamlines the development process but also offers a plethora of tools and services at one's fingertips. Such an integrated approach fosters efficiency, making it simpler to both develop and sustain applications over time.

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What are the benefits and challenges of using Google App Engine?

In this section, we are going to discuss about the several benefits and challenges of using Google App Engine. These are as follows:

Benefits of using Google App Engine

Here are some benefits of using Google App Engine:

a) Google App Engine is easy to set up. It can also be easily managed which makes it more attractive to its users. Its users can write codes without having the need to consider help from core IT professionals. It also allows its users to build back-end infrastructure. The built-in APIs, in Google App Engine allows users to build several different types of applications.

b) It also has the access to all the application logs which facilitates debugging and monitoring in production.

c) The pay-per-use pricing of Google App Engine makes it cost-effective and therefore users flock towards it. It has several resources which the users can use to monitor their resources and keep track of their bills in the dashboard.

d) It can automatically scale as the workloads fluctuate for the users. It can automatically add and remove application resources as per the demand.

e) It has the ability to specify a range of Internet Protocol addresses (IP) which are acceptable. Moreover, it also has the bandwidth to allow users to prepare a specific list of networks and resources and prepare blocklist for certain IP addresses.

Challenges of using Google App Engine

Here are some challenges of using Google App Engine:

a) Because of its back-end infrastructure it is sometimes difficult for users to fix their problems on their own. They have to depend on Google to fix those problems, ehich can sometimes be time-consuming.

b) Google App Engine has performance limits. This means that all CPU-intensive operations can be little bit expensive and slow, when using Google App Engine. The reason for this limitation can be that one physical server may serve numerous separate and related app engine users at the same time, who need to share the CPU.

c) GAE only provide limited read-only access to Google App Engine filesystem to Developers.

d) It limits Java apps. In Google App Engine Java apps are not able to create new threads and only certain section of Java runtime environment can be implemented.

Why Choose Google App Engine?

Google App Engine in Cloud Computing possesses a list of benefits over other services, which make it a standard choice for enterprises. Some of these benefits are as follows:

Cost-effective

One of the most compelling reasons to opt for Google App Engine is its cost-efficiency. Unlike traditional hosting, where overheads can rack up quickly, this tool's fully managed nature means there's no need to invest in system administration. In this Cloud Computing model, you pay strictly for the resources you consume. This allows businesses, from startups to large enterprises, to scale their operations without the dread of unexpected costs. The adaptability of adjusting your usage according to the demand ensures that you're always in control of your expenses.

Productivity boost

Time is of the essence in the Cloud Computing domain. It is attuned to this reality. By taking on the responsibility of infrastructure-related tasks, it liberates Developers to zero in on what truly matters: crafting exceptional code and refining their application. Without the distractions of backend management, Developers experience a tangible uptick in their productivity, ensuring that projects are delivered faster, and innovations reach the market promptly.

Nowadays cyber threats are rife, thus security isn't just a feature,it's a necessity. The Google App Engine stands tall on the foundation of Google's globally recognised secure infrastructure. But it doesn't just rest there; it continually fortifies its defences. Google App Engine uses its built-in security protocols and a commitment to meet the strictest compliance standards to ensure that your applications are ensconced in a digital fortress, safeguarded against potential threats.

Versatility

Google App Engine’sversatility shines through in its ability to support several projects. Whether you're aiming to launch a minimalist web application or architecting a labyrinthine system teeming with features, it is up to the task. From serving static web pages to managing backend operations for mobile applications bustling with high traffic, it proves time and again that it's a multifaceted Cloud Computing solution equipped to handle the diverse needs of the digital age. Unleash the capabilities of cloud computing with our Google Cloud Training  today!

The prominence of Google App Engine in Cloud Computing cannot be understated. It serves as a beacon of advanced design and user-friendliness, catering to both Developers and enterprises seamlessly. It stands out as the go-to choice for those seeking a dependable and secure Cloud infrastructure. When one aligns with Google App Engine, they're not only embracing the pinnacle of Cloud technology but also ensuring their applications consistently deliver top-tier performance.

Try our Architecting Infrastructure With Google Cloud Platform Training today!

Frequently Asked Questions

Google App Engine is a serverless platform that is used for developing and hosting web applications at scale. It also provides Developers with an access to Google’s scalable hosting and provides framework to them to develop apps.

Google App Engine allows Developers and users to build and run custom applications on Google servers. This App Engine applications help them to create, maintain, and scale the traffic and data storage.

Google App Engine in Cloud Computing is a Paas, which is also known as Platform as a Service model. This means that it provides users and Developers alike a platform to develop and deploy applications on the Google Cloud platform.

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A Comparative Study on Google App Engine Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure

International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology, 10(1), 2019, pp. 54-60

7 Pages Posted: 12 Mar 2020

Research Scholar, Shri Jagdishprasad Jhabarmal Tibrewala University, Rajasthan, India

Dr. M. Laxmaiah

Professor, Department of CSE and III Cell Head, CMR Engineering College, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Dr. Yogesh Kumar Sharma

Shri JJT University

Date Written: 2019

In today Internet has grown to be persistent in daily livelihood furthermore Cloud computing is a rising model where computing resources offered over the Internet as scalable, on-demand (Web) services. An association deploy internet service needs to use enormous amounts of money on infrastructure needs to serve feasible users which is not a problem for large venture but when it comes to Small and Medium Enterprises or Enterprises affordability becomes a huge factor with the huge infrastructure come problems like machines failure, hard drive noises, software bugs, etc. Here might be a big problem for such a community. Cloud Computing is the ultimate solution to this problem. Rather than buying, installing and operating its own systems, an organization can rely on a cloud provider to do this for them. Cloud Computing key market leaders like Google, Amazon and Microsoft etc, these providers introduce new operating and business models that allow customers to pay for the resources they completely use, instead of making tremendous upfront investments. The purpose of this paper is to analyze most popular platforms, The Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, and Windows Azure Platform.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Google App Engine, Amazon web services, Microsoft windows Azure

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Mahesh K (Contact Author)

Research scholar, shri jagdishprasad jhabarmal tibrewala university, rajasthan, india ( email ).

Jhunjhunu-Churu Road, Vidyanagari P.O. Chudela Jhunjhunu, CT Rajasthan 333001 India

Professor, Department of CSE and III Cell Head, CMR Engineering College, Hyderabad, Telangana, India ( email )

Hyderabad Telangana 501401 India

Shri JJT University ( email )

HOME PAGE: http://www.jjtu.ac.in

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Google case study: Engineering the future with Google Cloud Platform

Aker Solutions used Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage to build a set of digital engineering tools and a collaboration room to leverage its institutional expertise and revolutionize its field development methods.

Google Cloud results:

• Unlocks, accesses and links data from all previous field development projects providing high value insight for future plans
• Drives efficiency with a suite of products automating and supporting all aspects of concept selection, searchable database of reusable methods, assets and data.
• Speeds up the decision-making process with fully featured digital simulations of oil and gas field components as well as economical model for NPV, risk and reliability.
• Improves collaboration with a single platform for multiple teams working on complex projects.

Aker Solutions traces its history back to 1841, when it was founded as the Aker Mechanical Workshop in Oslo, Norway. After making its name in shipbuilding and maritime work, Aker Solutions is now one of the world’s top energy service providers employing more than 14,000 people across 20 countries. Lending its expertise to oil, gas, and wind projects in some of the most challenging environments, the company prides itself on delivering safe, sustainable solutions that benefit customers around the world. Following the oil price crash that began in 2014, the energy industry as a whole had to face a new reality of lowered profits and reduced capital expenditure. By 2016, Aker Solutions saw this squeezing of resources as a perfect opportunity to revolutionize its oil and gas field development methods and digitize its entire process. To do that, it turned to  Google Cloud Platform  (GCP).

We needed to get the investment cost down significantly for developing new fields. We saw a digital solution, based on Google Cloud Platform, as the best way of achieving that as well as stepping up our sustainability. Are Føllesdal Tjønn, Senior VP of Software Engineering, Aker Solutions

Building the field development process of the future

Traditionally, every field development project for an energy company is built from the ground up, independent of other projects that have gone before it with new teams, new materials, and new equipment. While this provides a bespoke precision to each project, it is also expensive, time-consuming and encourages inefficiency. By digitizing its field development process, Aker Solutions wanted to build up a bank of institutional expertise that could be accessed quickly and effectively and minimize the time and cost of field development.

Initially placed under the working title “Project Push” – the idea being that new field projects could be developed “at the push of a button” – Aker Solutions focused its efforts on a number of areas. Firstly, the company wanted a searchable database of digital information for each field development project. This would ensure that successful methods and techniques would live well beyond the life of any single project and could inform projects months and years down the line.

A second pillar of the Push Project was the concept of the “Digital Twin”. The idea was to have a digital representation of field assets that goes far beyond a simple 3D illustration. Aker Solutions wanted to measure and simulate every possible attribute of each field development project, all built within a rich and consistent data structure that would underpin several different applications. “Ideally,” says Are, “we would be able to simulate all asset operations before we physically start building.” This would help Aker Solutions and its customers make the right decisions much earlier in the process, saving significantly on time and money.

GCP for a scalable, flexible, high performance solution

In mid-2016, with the core objectives of searchability, reusability and expedited decision-making, Aker Solutions, together with customer AkerBP, began looking for ways to implement the Push Project. At the time, the company’s IT infrastructure was based on heavy duty enterprise solutions running off on-premises servers. While this had been perfectly adequate for its operations until then, Aker Solutions decided that only a scalable, cloud-based solution could fully deliver the ambitious results it had in mind for the digitization project.

For the latter half of 2016, Aker Solutions tested a number of solutions on the leading cloud providers, teaming up with cloud specialists Computas to help it navigate the cloud-based environment. “Having a local partner in Norway was key for us,” says Are, “and we were also very impressed with Computas’ expertise in agile methodologies like Scrum project management.” After taking the time to assess Aker Solutions’ requirements, Computas recommended Google Cloud Platform as the core of the new solution. “GCP is a platform that allows you to do things in a very quick way. You can get going without any hassle or time wasting,” says Rune Hagbartsen, Executive Director at Computas. “We were able to deliver solutions very quickly and the support form Google Norway was great.”

Another key advantage of GCP for Aker Solutions, was the ability to integrate with the company’s existing enterprise platforms and engineering solutions. Rather than replacing what was already working, Computas and Aker Solutions began building a new infrastructure for Project Push, leveraging the existing stack of the core business.

The use of Google Cloud Platform was an enabler for a deep change in the way software was developed. The Push Project started as a traditional IT procurement initiative but quickly evolved into a strong partnership between Aker Solutions, Aker BP and Computas. This partnership mindset allowed for a true agile development methodology supported by the fundamental flexibility of the Google Cloud Platform. With agility came the possibility to exploit opportunities, and the Push Project evolved from system development to the development of a platform housing the products required by the digitization process.

For the concept of the Digital Twin, Computas and Aker Solutions developed a family of applications built on Google App Engine: “That gave us the ability to open and deploy images very quickly, which helped us a lot,” says Filip Van Laenen, Computas Chief Engineer. The data pipeline was handled with Google Cloud Dataflow and the messaging requirements with Google Cloud Pub/Sub. The scaling ability of Google Cloud Dataflow is a game changer when you need to ingest and process millions of data entities and documents in order to make them searchable. The different products in the Push portfolio take advantage of Google Cloud SQL or Google Cloud Datastore depending on their specific requirements.

Computas developed a way of analyzing usage data using  Google BigQuery , taking data from Google Stackdriver Monitoring. The team used Google Cloud Functions at various places to “glue” functionality together and to integrate with the existing infrastructure. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Storage was used to hold the millions of documents and static assets from new and older field projects. The ability to use a fully managed, elastic storage makes a real difference for an application platform using a lot of documents.

The ability to use REST APIs with Google Cloud Storage was very important for us. It’s a small thing but we saved a lot of work using REST APIs to upload files instead of implementing them ourselves. Filip Van Laenen, Chief Engineer, Computas

Greater efficiency, higher quality outputs, improved collaboration

Two years since it first conceived the idea, Aker Solutions is part way through its massive digitization journey but has already seen remarkable results. “Overall”, says Are, “the new search and Engineering Assistant applications have already resulted in efficiency gains of around 20%. A typical topside project normally takes around a million hours, so cutting 200,000 hours is a very significant saving both for us and our customers,” he says. A product manager is now able to provide an estimate of an industry asset’s weight, such as an offshore platform, in just a few hours, down from days and weeks if they had used the traditional method. Are says that the impact of the changes made can be much bigger than the 20%. He likens the change to shifting from manually washing the dishes to using a dishwasher. “You can do so much more”.

When you improve your efficiency, you can work on the quality of the output. Whether that’s doing more iterations, analysis or looking for new solutions. We’ve not only saved time for our customers, but also improved the quality and safety aspects of our field development projects. Are Føllesdal Tjønn, Senior VP of Software Engineering, Aker Solutions

As well as the efficiency gains, the Push Project has led to teams working more closely with each other. “When the information is all there on a single platform like the Engineering Assistant app, then it helps to keep everyone on the same page,” says Are. With everything on GCP, the company has been able to improve its security procedures for sensitive information. “Before people would use data by copying it from spreadsheets and take it away on their laptops,” says Filip. “Now, it’s held and secured in a database.” More qualitatively, with its emphasis on recording, searching and reusing data, Aker Solutions has brought a new-found objectivity to its field development methods.

“It’s helped us take the subjectivity out of our decision making, which helps us get to the right decisions earlier,” says Are.

Aker Solutions’ journey with GCP and Computas is far from over. With its oil and gas field development projects digitized, Aker Solutions is now preparing to bring its operations teams into the process. The company is currently exploring the suite of machine learning tools from GCP as a way of improving the indexing of its documents, to make searching for the relevant information even quicker than before. In addition, the company is checking how to use Google’s Vision API to help collate, categorize and analyze the millions of PDF documents that it deals with from partners and subcontractors for each project, saving time and minimizing the risk of errors from manual tagging. AutoML Vision is evaluated as a way to let the domain experts directly influence the machine learning required in the process. With the digitization process well underway, automation looks to be the next objective.

“The more we automate, the more we can see to automate,” says Are. “We’re excited about what we’ve achieved so far, but we also see a lot of potential in the journey ahead with GCP.”

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In the most significant legal ruling against a major technology giant in more than two decades, a federal judge says Google illegally monopolized online search and advertising by paying companies like Apple and Samsung billions of dollars a year to install Google as the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers.

By monopolizing search queries on smartphones and browsers, Google abused its dominance in the search market, throttling competition and harming consumers, U.S. District Judge  Amit P. Mehta  said in his 286-page decision. Google owes much of its more than $300 billion in annual revenue to search ads.

“ Google is a monopolist , and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.

The massive win for the Department of Justice could fundamentally reshape how Google does business . It also could change how we use the internet and search for information. 

The DOJ filed antitrust charges during the final weeks of the Trump administration, making good on Donald Trump’s pledge to challenge the runaway power of Big Tech. That mission continued during the Biden administration, which has been aggressive in pursuing antitrust cases.

“This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “No company – no matter how large or influential – is above the law.”

The case is the most significant victory for the DOJ in a monopoly case in decades, said Notre Dame Law School professor Roger Alford, who served in the DOJ’s antitrust division. “Not since Microsoft lost in the 1990s have we seen a case of this magnitude.”

Google said it would appeal the decision. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Kent Walker, president of global affairs, said in a statement.

Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet slipped following the judge's ruling. They closed down nearly 5% Monday, part of a broader tech stock selloff .

If upheld, the decision will be a “major boost” for other antitrust cases pending against Google as well as other major tech players like Amazon, Apple and Meta, said Loyola University Chicago School of Law professor Spencer Weber Waller.

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Devising the right remedy is critical to restoring competition to the marketplace, Waller said.

“There are no fines or monetary penalties in these types of cases, but the court will have to decide whether Google should be broken up in some way. More likely, it will order Google to eliminate the exclusive contracts and licensing restrictions that have reinforced its monopoly position for years,” he said.

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“People clearly prefer Google to Bing,” Sebastian said.

Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich said Monday's ruling hands Microsoft an unearned boost.

“The biggest winner from today's ruling isn't consumers or little tech, it’s Microsoft,” Kovacevich said in a statement. “Microsoft has underinvested in search for decades, but today’s ruling opens the door to a court mandate of default deals for Bing. That’s a slap in the face to consumers who chose Google because they think it’s the best.”

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Google Rolls Out August 2024 Core Update

Google's August 2024 core update targets low-value SEO content, promoting quality websites. Full rollout expected within a month.

• Google launched its August 2024 core update.
• The update aims to boost high-quality content and demote SEO-focused material.
• Full rollout may take up to one month to complete.

Google rolled out its August 2024 core update.

This latest algorithm change aims to boost high-quality content and demote low-value SEO-focused material in search results.

The update was announced on X and detailed on Google’s blog .

Today we released the August 2024 core update. It continues our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search. https://t.co/T6Qt0JUoWt — Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) August 15, 2024

Key Details About The August Core Update

• Google core updates aim to show more content that people find genuinely helpful.
• Core updates target content created primarily to rank well in search results rather than provide value to users.
• Google states this update considers recent feedback from content creators and other stakeholders.
• The company reaffirms its commitment to showcasing high-quality content from diverse sources, including smaller, independent websites.
• The update aims to better reflect positive changes made by websites.

Extended Implementation Period

According to the Google Search Status dashboard , this core update’s full rollout may take up to one month to complete.

This gradual implementation is typical for major updates, allowing time for the changes to propagate across Google’s vast index.

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In conjunction with the core update, Google shared a link to its help documentation on core updates.

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SEJ will provide ongoing analysis and expert takes as the August 2024 update’s effects unfold.

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Updated Core Update Guidance

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Key changes in the revised guidance include:

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For a detailed breakdown of the changes in Google’s core update guidance, see our article: Google Revises Core Update Guidance: What’s Changed?

New: Unrelated Search Ranking Glitch

While the August 2024 core update continues to roll out, Google has confirmed a separate issue affecting search rankings. This glitch is unrelated to the core update.

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Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, ...