Multi-domain deployment of Google App Engine (GAE) apps

Question

We would like to develop and sell custom commercial GAE applications. I would like information on the deployment of GAE applications on arbitrary Google Apps domains (i.e. not appspot).

Suppose our company is abc.com and we are selling app to def.com and xyz.com. What are the steps to deploy our app on our customer's domain?

When an app is deployed on many domains:

• Is the code duplicated or shared?
• Is the datastore definition duplicated or shared (or more precisly the kinds)?
• Any domain attribute add to the entity?

Answer 1

You have three options at the moment, when it comes to a 'multi-tenant' app such as you describe:

1. You can have a single app that your customers add to their domains. Your app will have a single datastore, but you can use the Host header to determine which customer is accessing the app, and segregate the datastore entries based on that.
   • Easy to deploy and upgrade
   • Easy for customers to install
   • Users have to have Google accounts, not Apps accounts, to log in.
2. You can deploy a fresh app instance for each customer.
   • Harder to deploy and upgrade
   • More customer involvement required to install
   • Provides firm separation of data
   • Users can log in with their Apps credentials
3. You can work with Google to create a new Apps Marketplace app
   • All the benefits of point 1 and 2, above
   • Requires Google involvement
   • No certain release date yet