Earlier this week I wrote a guest post for the Google App Engine Blog on how Pulse has scaled-up our backend infrastructure to prepare for the recent Kindle Fire launch.

The Kindle Fire includes Pulse as one of the only preloaded apps and is projected to sell over five million units this quarter alone. This meant we had to prepare for nearly doubling our user-base in a very short period. We also needed to be ready for spikes in load due to press events and the holiday season.

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A few thoughts from my first test of Google App Engine.

My goal was to put up a prototype java web app for pushing email alerts based on RSS content (more to come on the full idea). Unfortunately, it took much longer than I expected to get things going (longer than my web app protoype took to write) – leaving me feeling a bit disappointed.  On the up side,  the app has been running quite well for about a week now.

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