My project  Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs)  faces goods distribution problems  needs necessary resources, money and technical expertise, to purchase and implement complex planning softwares  Aim to build an easy-to-deploy/use/maintain software  that helps companies manage their sale orders and deliveries  focusing specifically on planning optimised distribution routes.

Use cases - Customer Mgmt  The system maintains a dynamic list of customers with their details, most importantly their delivery addresses.

Use case – Product Mgmt  The system maintains a dynamic list of materials with their details, especially delivery costs in terms of size units and/or weight units.

Use case – Order Mgmt  The system allows customers to place orders for products.  Orders can be one-off or recurring (daily, weekly or monthly).

Use case – Vehicle Mgmt  The system maintains a dynamic list of vehicles with their details, especially operating cost and vehicle capacity in terms size units and/or weight units.

Use case – Delivery Mgmt  Delivery planning, which includes vehicle routing, is done automatically on a daily basis.  Planning can also be done manually with modified variables and results are stored for review and analysis.

Use case – Inventory Mgmt  The system maintains inventory counts and carries out Material Requirement Planning (MRP) based on projected demands and sales orders.

Implementation  Google App Engine (GAE): Was first released as beta in April Is a platform for ○ developing and ○ hosting web applications ○ in Google-managed data centres. Is cloud computing technology ○ It virtualizes applications across multiple servers and data centres

Why is it good?  Easy to scale from one to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.  Low cost – you can jumpstart your application with zero cost  Fast development – No assembly required – fully-integrated development environment.  Easy maintenance – no worry about software updates or compatibility issues  The pitch: You write the code, someone else worries about everything else

What can it do?  Serve static files  Serve dynamic requests  Store data  Call web services  Authenticate with user’s Google account  Send  Process images  Use memcache

Any catch?  GAE is only free up to a certain limit (but it is large enough for comfortable use)  Stored Data – 1 GB  Datastore API Calls – 141M calls daily  Image Manipulation API Calls – 45M calls daily  Mail API Calls – 2,000 s daily  Requests – 43M requests daily  Bandwidth – 1GB daily  CPU Time – 6.5 CPU-hours daily

Billing  Use as much as needed, whenever needed  Pay only for what is used  Like utility (power, water)  No need to build own infrastructure  Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)  No need to install supporting softwares  Platform as a service (PaaS) ResourceUnitUnit Cost BandwidthGB$0.10 CPU timeCPU hour$0.10 Stored dataGB/month$0.15 Recipients edRecipient$0.0001

Datastore  BigTable  Distributed storage system for structured data  Petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers  Designed to scale applications to a very large size  Used by many projects at Google: web indexing, Google Earth, Google Finance,…

Datastore  Not a relational database  Fully object oriented – data is stored as entities which have properties (key/value pairs)  No join – use reference properties  No aggregate queries – not even count  All queries must run against an index  and some other weird rules

More information 