How does Google App Engine infrastructure is fault tolerant?

Question

Hi everybody,

I am actually implementing a web application on Google App Engine. This has taken me for the moment a huge time in re-designing the database and the application through GAE requirements and best practices.

My problem is this: How can I be sure that GAE is fault tolerant, or at what degree is it fault tolerant? I didn't find any documents in GAE on this, and it is an issue that could have drawbacks for me: My app would have, for example, to read an entity from the datastore, compute it in the application, and then put it on the datastore. In this case how could we be sure that this would be correctly done and that we get the right data : if for example the machine on which the computing have be done crash ?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

If a server crashes during a request, that request is going to fail, but any new requests would be routed to a different server. So one user might see an error, but the rest would not. The data in the datastore would be fine. If you have data that needs to be kept consistent, you would do your updates in a transaction, so that either the whole set of updates was applied or none.

Answer 2

thank you for your response,

So if we want to keep a data consistent it is the own solution ? But transactions won't affect the scalability, because they would be serialized and multiple access to datastore won't be possible in this case, isn't it ?

thank you again.

Answer 3

Transactions operating on the same entity group are executed serially, but transactions operating on different entity groups run in parallel. So, unless there is a single entity which everything in your app wants to read and write, scalability will not suffer from transactions.