Developing Solutions for Google Cloud Platform with App Engine

Building Solutions for Google Cloud Platform with App Engine

As developers, the learning never ends. Just when we get used to a certain technology, it goes and changes. We’re always needing to learn new languages, frameworks, APIs, and platforms.

And if you’re also in charge of deploying your code, then you need to understand how to setup and configure web servers, deal with scaling issues and manage databases. Frankly, it can be exhausting!

So, why invest the time in learning yet another set of technologies? That’s the question I find myself asking whenever some new trend comes along. I want to know how it’ll make my job, and the jobs of my peers better or easier.

Throughout my career I’ve been responsible for deploying my own code. And I think that’s why the Google Cloud Platform resonates with me so well. It’s a platform that understands developers.

So, why take the time to learn something like App Engine? I think the answer is simple. Because you can take all your development experience and apply it to a platform as a service that removes most of the obstacles to getting code running in production.

The value of having Google ensure your app is highly available is worth a lot to me. We get a rich set of tools for developing locally, and simple deployments, with application versioning. All while using the same programming languages and frameworks that we’re used to.

If you’re looking for a native cloud platform for building out highly scalable applications, or mobile back-ends, then you’ve come to the right place. App Engine provides all that and more.

This course focuses on teaching you about the tools App Engine provides to build out highly scalable systems.

We’ll be building out Python web applications using Flask, and using Cloud Datastore as our database. There is a bit of a learning curve to getting started. And that’s what this course is for, to minimize the amount of time spent learning the platform, so you can get back to writing code.

The source code lives on: Github so feel free to download it, and follow along.

We’ll cover a lot of data in this 2 hour course. And by the end of it, you should feel comfortable getting started building out App Engine applications of your own.

And if you’re looking to get your Qualified Solutions Developer certification, this is going help you with that too.

So, if this sounds useful to you, let’s get started!

Course Objectives

In this course

• We’ll create an App Engine application, and deploy it
• We’ll be Developing a REST API with Cloud Endpoints
• We’ll learn about the different Authentication and Authorization methods available on App Engine.
• We’ll learn about the monitoring and management tools available.
• We’ll cover the different storage options available.
• We’ll review Cloud Datastore more in depth.
• We’ll look into ways to improve application performance.
• And We’ll learn about Task Queues.

Intended Audience

This is a intermediate level course because it assumes:

• You have development experience

What You'll Learn

Lecture	What you'll learn
Intro	What will be covered in this course
Getting Started	Creating our first App Engine application
Cloud Endpoints	How to create RESTful APIs with Endpoints
Services	How to break our applications down into separate services
Authentication	How can we authenticate users?
Managing Applications	How do we manage App Engine apps?
Storage	How do we use the different storage options?
Datastore	A more in depth look at datastore
App Performance	How can we make our apps more responsive?
Task Queues	How can we run tasks outside of a user request?
What's next?	Where do we go from here?