Google App Engine can be used to host infinitely scalable web applications on Google’s infrastructure. It supports Django and is even free for low demand sites – perfect for a light touch, cloud based approach to deploying websites. Potato kindly hosted a Django Bath and Bristol Users Group last night to tell us more.
Two excellent, informative talks provided by Jason Cartwright and Adam Alton certainly sold the idea to me. While there are some limitations that need to be worked around, developing and deploying web applications using Django on Google App Engine does have many benefits, including:
- Automatic, limitless scalability (up or down).
- No hardware maintenance or back-up woes
- Free hosting (up to 500 MB storage, or 5M monthly page views)
- Multiple site instances – easy staging and testing environments
- Google authentication built-in
- + loads of free and useful API’s and tools
The limitations are mainly around limited request time-outs, maximum record retrievals and relational database storage issues. While this does effect Django, there are tools available to work around all the above, Adam has provided a nice list: http://tinyurl.com/django-gae
I do look forward to experimenting with Google App Engine in the near future.
