In April 2008, 10,000 developers from all around the world were lucky enough to get an account to access the preview release of Google App Engine, which is a tool designed to let users run their web applications on the same infrastructure Google uses for its own services. Announced during Google's Campfire One event, App Engine was described as something easy to use, easy to scale and free to get started; three design goals that perfectly matched the requirements of a typical tech start-up trying to reduce the time to market.

While other big companies at that time were already offering to lease part of their own infrastructure, selling reliability and scalability in an affordable, pay-per-use fashion, Google set App Engine one step ahead by providing developers with application-building blocks instead of simple access to hardware; it is a hosting model followed by many others later on. The goal of this model is to let developers focus on the code and forget about failing machines, network issues, scalability problems, and performance tuning; the choice of Python as the first programming language supported by App Engine was a natural choice for a tool whose aim is to make writing and running web applications easier.

During the Google I/O event in 2012, Google announced that several other building blocks from its own infrastructure would be made available under the name of Google Cloud Platform, first as a partner program and then as a general availability product. Currently, App Engine is not only a notable member of the Cloud Platform family but also a mature and well-maintained platform, widely adopted and with a huge list of customers' success stories.

This book will teach you how to write and run web applications in Python with App Engine, getting the most out of Google Cloud Platform. Starting with a simple application, you will add more and more features to it, each time with the help of the components and services provided by Google's infrastructure.