👉 Overview
👀 What ?
GCP App Engine Persistence is a service provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that allows developers to create and manage data persistence in their applications running on Google's App Engine. The App Engine Persistence service revolves around the use of Google's NoSQL document database called Datastore, designed for automatic scaling, high performance, and ease of application development.
🧐 Why ?
Data persistence is a critical component of many applications, particularly those that need to store and retrieve user data or other information between sessions. Without a robust persistence mechanism, data might be lost each time an application is restarted or a user session ends. This is why GCP App Engine Persistence is important. It provides a reliable and scalable solution for data persistence, capable of storing and retrieving any amount of data at any time. For developers building applications on GCP's App Engine, understanding and implementing App Engine Persistence is essential for data management.
⛏️ How ?
To use GCP App Engine Persistence, you first need to set up a GCP account and create a project. Then, in the Google Cloud Console, you can create a new App Engine application and enable Datastore for it. Once Datastore is enabled, you can use Google's client libraries in your application code to interact with Datastore. You can perform operations like creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting data entities. Google provides client libraries for several popular programming languages, including Java, Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, and PHP.
⏳ When ?
Google introduced App Engine in 2008 as a platform-as-a-service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Since then, it has evolved to support a broad set of persistent storage options, including the NoSQL Datastore database, a fully managed, schemaless database for storing non-relational data.
⚙️ Technical Explanations
At a technical level, GCP App Engine Persistence relies on the use of Google's NoSQL Datastore database. Datastore automatically manages scaling, allowing applications to maintain high performance as they receive more traffic and store more data. It's designed for applications that require high availability and consistency, providing ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes, and much more. Data in Datastore is stored as entities, each of which has a key and one or more properties. To interact with Datastore, applications use Google's client libraries, which provide a simple, idiomatic API for performing common operations. It's also possible to use Google's Cloud Datastore API directly, which provides a RESTful interface for more complex operations.