Dart applications can be hosted on the Google Cloud Platform—they run in a custom runtime on App Engine Managed VM. In contrast to the secure, sandboxed environments in which Python, Java, Go, and PHP are run, Dart runs in a VM-based hosting environment, which is more flexible, providing more CPU and memory options.

In the previous chapters, we learned how to write HTTP clients and servers in Dart, which is exactly what we need for a Dart app running in a managed VM.

This environment uses the Docker cloud service to distribute applications. Docker is a tool, written in the Go programming language, to package an application and its dependencies in a virtual container that can run on any Linux server. Docker can be used with various infrastructure tools besides Google Cloud Platform, a few being Amazon Web Services, Chef, Jelastic, Jenkins, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack Nova, OpenSVC, Puppet, and Salt. If you do not develop on Linux, you will...