I built a web application used by more than 3,000 people. The backend was Google Apps Script. It ran for almost two years while we kept improving the application. We eventually moved it to AWS — not because Apps Script couldn’t handle the application, but because changes around Google’s authentication model gave us the opportunity to move to a more conventional backend and database architecture. Here’s how I built it, what problems we ran into, and why we didn’t build a traditional backend from the beginning.
In Pulse we’ve featured a couple of examples and tips on scaling Apps Script Web Apps. One of the most extensive solutions we’ve shared is Zig Mandel’s open-source Apps Script Website Integration Framework. Partha Sahoo has recently shared how his team used Google Sheets and Google Apps Script to develop a client facing frontend for over 3,000 users. The model they adopted is one I’ve not seen before. It’s a clever distributed model which combines a central database and script library with individual Google Sheets and Web Apps for each client. With this model workloads are shared across individual web apps:
There are some clever features in this solution which you can get an overview of in Partha’s post. A couple I would like to highlight are:
- Exponential Backoff Polling: To stay comfortably below Apps Script’s quotas, the frontend avoided aggressive continuous polling. The client would initially poll every 5 minutes and if there were no changes to the data scaled down via exponential backoff to 30 minutes.
- Central Library Multi-Tenancy: To avoid the burden of maintaining hundreds of individual web app deployments, core business logic lives in a versioned central Apps Script library (paired with a staging library for testing). This allowed Sahoo to ship bug fixes and feature rollouts fleet-wide instantly without redeploying individual client projects.
After nearly two years in production, the platform migrated to AWS. As Partha explains, the move was not driven by Apps Script reaching an operational bottleneck, but by evolving Google Workspace authentication policies, which made a conventional cloud backend more practical for long-term compliance. As noted in Partha’s post, the migration of the Apps Script code to AWS was easily refactored with AI assistance.
We’re in interesting times. On the one hand the beta Gemini side panel in the Apps Script Editor makes it easy to deploy web apps, on the other tools like Google AI Studio make it easy to vibe code applications to run in Google’s cloud infrastructure. Both introduce new risks, but also opportunities.
Member of Google Developers Experts Program for Google Workspace (Google Apps Script) and interested in supporting Google Workspace Devs.