Comments on: What Exactly Is Google App Engine?

By: battery

battery — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

[...]The offline scripting tool might add some relief here, but it’s still sort of a pain. I’ve had to separate “build” from “configuration” steps.[...]

By: Simon Wardley

Simon Wardley — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

The real innovation in GoogleAppEngine is the provision of the Open SDK which is basically an open sourced standard. This open SDK can be re-implemented on other environments, even AWS, and hence is a first real step towards portability in the SaaS, PaaS, FaaS or whatever other aaS world.

This or that language, this or that platform, misses the point by miles of what GAE can really become.

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/run-rabbit-ru...

By: mitchell_as5509

mitchell_as5509 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

GAE is all about getting developers to use Google's toolkit of APIs and build software on Google's platform. Your friend Scott Moody is right that it locks developers into Google's platform but in the long run that may or may not be such a bad thing.

GAE is more akin to what Salesforce did with force.com, letting you create applications with their own technology. It's not portable, but if the ecosystem is alive and well portability might not be as important. As a general development platform for startups, GAE could be too limiting unless it is some type of play around Google.

I see GAE as more of the beginnings by Google to create third party applications around Google's own offerings, building a much richer ecosystem. It may also be a good way to help Google Android phone app developers build the cloud-side of their offerings on Google's cloud. GAE could enable many parts of Google's strategy. Rumors are that it took Ray Ozzie quite by surprise but I don't know if that's true or not.

I also blogged about GAE when it was announced. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/26719

By: Brian Berliner

Brian Berliner — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

I've written numerous articles on Amazon EC2, and took a close look at Google App Engine. You are right that there is a switching cost (and some risk surrounding that at the present), but for the vast majority of the new class of Web-based startups, Google App Engine clearly wins. Hands down. And, I'm a big EC2 fan.

Most recent articles about Google App Engine:
An Example of Why Google App Engine Will Win
Google App Engine Body-Slams Amazon Web Services

Enjoy!

-Brian

By: zeroth8105

zeroth8105 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

Basically, GAPE(Google App Engine), is a tool for rapid deployment of an interactive website. Because it supports Python(and by extension, Django) Basically... it can give a startup first mover advantage. It lets someone build a Digg-like site, or a wiki site in almost literally hours. Again, this is great, lowers costs of startups, lets VCs like yourself fund more startups, and logically make more money(You get a return on about 1/10 of all startups... if you fund more... more will succeed. )

EC2 is scalable, cheap(ridiculously cheap), and yes, you still do need sysadmins. But I consider EC2 a second stage solution. Basically, GAPE lets people get set up, get their ideas operational quickly, and thus, hopefully, making money. Once they reach that point, and want to scale up, then they can move to EC2. Of course, the third stage is where they run localized data centers all over the world like Google. Most startups will never reach that point.

One of the old Paul Graham articles(Older is better with him... his new stuff isn't so good) mentioned one key difference between his company and the competition. They used Lisp, which made them faster programmers. They used a better technology, to move faster. This is, I think, part of what makes a startup succeed or fail.

By: Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

Who says that memcached is a "hack"? Tons of giant web properties use it every day.

By: Paul Freet

Paul Freet — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

For a 'real' web services company, Amazon is vastly superior. Here are just a few MAJOR issues with GAE: no cron jobs, no SSL!, must use Google login, no image processing, hard fail when 'over-quota'. I am sure there are more, but this is enough to say no way Google.

By: Scott Moody

Scott Moody — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

I didn't mean that memcached is a hack — it is an amazing piece of infrastructure software. What I meant was this: the way in which memcached is sometimes applied to the problem of relational database scaling is a hack.

By: charlie_o038903

charlie_o038903 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

I'd be surprised, and very disappointed, if Google didn't offer a way to get your application's data out of Data Store. After all, they have differentiated themselves by letting you easily get your email out of Gmail. Other webmail providers, notably Microsoft, have not been so accommodating. That's been a point of pride for Google. Not allowing this with App Engine would quite literally go against everything they stand for.

As for the programming interface they provide, it makes perfect sense to me. They've designed a scalable architecture that works a certain way, and if you want to use their cloud, why shouldn't you expect to be writing for that architecture? I expect the short request constraint will be a non issue once they add support for submitting your own MapReduce jobs against your data store objects.

There are open source projects already modeled after MapReduce and BigTable (Hadoop, HBase and Hypertable for instance), and I fully expect that the App Engine API will be duplicated on other cloud computing hosting companies, either by startups acting as intermediaries or by the hosting companies themselves.

Another thing I expect to see are python tools (plugins to Django perhaps, or even new python web frameworks) made to support App Enigne. There is no longer a need for object-relational mapping libraries, to name the biggest difference in the platform. Another tool that I hope will be widely adopted would be an OpenID plugin. There is no reason why an App Engine application needs to tie itself to Google Accounts - that has simply been provided by Google as the default, built-in option for user accounts. It should be fairly straightforward to write an application, for example, that lets users sign up with their choice of an OpenID account or a Google account. Now that's a nice thought!

By: dave_naffzi2081

dave_naffzi2081 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

Good writeup. It is worth noting that Amazon *just* announced persistent storage for EC2 instances:____http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/04/persi...

By: steve_bjorg3568

steve_bjorg3568 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

EC2 and App Engine are different facets of Cloud Software. They serve a different purpose and work best when put together. More about this on a recent in a recent post:
http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2008/04/11/google-a...

By: friarminor8877

friarminor8877 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

Cloud wars just starting and other big players are ready to jump in at this point. Expect open source a another big winner in all of these offerings but why do i get the feeling it won't be too open in the future once the big hands start dipping in?

Best.
alain

By: Elliot Ross

Elliot Ross — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

I agree with Mitchell – It is perfectly aligned with their strategy. You are in Google Docs or what have, you, and a simple link takes you to a Project Management tool, another one into a work force tool etc – Microsoft will be looking over their shoulder

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

take at look at cohesiveft. They have already implemented the APP Engine SDK on AWS