App Engine

Google App Engine is a fully managed, serverless Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developing and hosting web applications and mobile backends. It automatically scales applications based on traffic, abstracting away infrastructure management and allowing developers to focus solely on writing code.

Key facts

First appeared: 2008
Category: technology
Problem solved: App Engine was created to solve the problems of scaling web applications, managing server infrastructure, and handling unpredictable traffic spikes. It aimed to provide developers with a 'no ops' environment where they could deploy applications without worrying about server provisioning, patching, or load balancing, significantly reducing operational overhead and accelerating development cycles.
Platforms: google_cloud_platform, web

Related technologies

.NET
Google Cloud Storage
Go
Google Cloud Datastore
Node.js
Ruby
Java
Google Cloud SQL
PHP
Python
Google Cloud Memorystore (Memcache/Redis)

Notable users

Khan Academy
MongoDB (for various internal tools and services)
Wix (previously for certain services)
The New York Times
Snap Inc. (Snapchat)