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: 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