Book excerpt: As one of today's cloud computing services, Google App Engine does more than provide access to a large system of servers. It also offers you a simple model for building applications that scale automatically to accommodate millions of users. With Programming Google App Engine, you'll get expert practical guidance that will help you make the best use of this powerful platform. Google engineer Dan Sanderson shows you how to design your applications for scalability, including ways to perform common development tasks using App Engine's APIs and scalable services. You'll learn about App Engine's application server architecture, runtime environments, and scalable datastore for distributing data, as well as techniques for optimizing your application. App Engine offers nearly unlimited computing power, and this book provides clear and concise instructions for getting the most from it right from the source. Discover the differences between traditional web development and development with App Engine Learn the details of App Engine's Python and Java runtime environments Understand how App Engine handles web requests and executes application code Learn how to use App Engine's scalable datastore, including queries and indexes, transactions, and data modeling Use task queues to parallelize and distribute work across the infrastructure Deploy and manage applications with ease