Last week was Google App Engine announcement and brouhaha.  This week is deeper analysis and understanding of Google App Engine. I spent some time last week trying to understand this better, read a bunch of stuff, and spent some time having a top secret special meeting that I can’t talk about with some of my friends at Microsoft where this was discussed.

Following are three interesting things for you this morning (all courtesy of my friend Scott Moody) if you are interested in learning more:

1. The Google App Engine Q&A – an in-depth blogger-created FAQ that provides great links to other blog posts on the topic and summarizes various opinions and known facts.

2. Google App Engine for developers – Nial Kennedy’s overview from his meeting with the App Engine team leads.

3. A high level comparison (via email) from Scott Moody where he compares App Engine and Amazon EC2.  Since Scott doesn’t keep a blog, following is the pertinent text from his email.

Google hides infrastructure from AppEngine users. AE programmers never (and, in fact, aren’t allowed to) think about database scaling and configuration, load balancing , fail-over, etc. In theory, the complexity of writing a highly scalable app completely disappears.

With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, implement scalability hacks if things grow too fast (such as distributed caching of data via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-date, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still require sys admins, AppEngine companies don’t. That will certainly change as more companies begin offering EC2 server management services.

Google provides a non-relational datastore and that’s the only datastore available (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people generally use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a non-relational datastore called SimpleDB, but it’s a bit *too* simple. For example, it does not support sorting of results sets. Huh? That makes it non-workable in my opinion. There’s also an issue with using EC2 virtual machines for your database servers — Amazon says that when a virtual machine crashes, all the data managed by it disappears, so virtual machine crash = hard drive crash.

With EC2, programmers can use any (non-Microsoft) language to develop their apps. AppEngine users must code in Python. Also, Google does not support sockets at this time. All cross-app communication must be done via HTTP.

At *this* moment in time, it would be difficult to move apps off of AppEngine. Doing that in EC2 is trivial. This, to me, is the biggest issue, as I believe it could make startups less-interesting from an acquisition perspective by anyone other than Google. This will most likely change as people develop compatibility layers. However, Google has yet to provide any information about how to migrate data from their datastore the best I can tell. If you have a substantial amount of data, you can’t just write code to dump it because they will only let any request run for a short period before they terminate it.

Some people are complaining about Google having access to their source code. I don’t see this as an issue. I’d rather have it be stored at Google than at some small hosting company.

One final nice little thing in AppEngine’s favor: Websites that store less than 500MB of data and get roughly 5MM pageviews per month or less can use AppEngine for free. The downside is that Google has yet to say what they’ll charge if apps go over that quota, but I have to believe that it will be reasonable.  Right now, you’re prevented from going above the free-level quotas.

If you are into this and have other good links, please leave a comment with them.

As I was reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I came across Graeme Thickins reposting of the Google 2007 Annual Letter (this year written by Larry Page.)  It a good one – written in plain, straightforward English.  Worth a careful read for anyone that interacts with The Google.

On Google Blogoscoped, I ran into a post titled The Tools Google Uses Internally that is a short overview of a web seminar that walks through the tools a typical Googler works with daily.  This led me to the actual presentation (59 slides – many of them screenshots) which I found fascinatingly detailed.  If you’ve heard of MOMA, Snippet, and Ideas but never seen screenshots, now you can join the magic special club.

I must have Microsoft / Yahoo / Google on my mind this morning.  Micah Baldwin has written a delicious scorpion / frog parable about M/Y/G.  Until four minutes ago, I thought The Scorpion and the Frog was an Aesop fable, but now due to the beautifulness and truthfulness of all things wikipedia, I now know that it’s the basis of the plot for the Star Trek: Voyager: Scorpion.  You – dear reader – might remember it from Natural Born Killers or The Crying Game.

I’ve been chewing on what to say about the Microsoft / Yahoo merger and its impact on entrepreneurship and – more specifically – Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.  I was finally gearing up to splat out some of my thoughts on paper, but after reading Marc Andreessen’s brilliant post titled Silicon Valley after a Microsoft / Yahoo merger: a contrarian view, I don’t have to.  While I don’t agree with 100% of the things Marc says, he covers all the ground I would have an just saved me 30 minutes of writing.

Zimbra just released v5.0.  For those of you that don’t know Zimbra, it’s a Microsoft Exchange / Outlook competitor that Yahoo bought last year for $350m.  While v5.0 looks nifty, I was thinking about the release notice to Zimbra customers for Zimbra v6.0, which I assume will be released after Microsoft completes their conquest acquisition of Yahoo (for those of you that live under a rock in a cave, Microsoft made an offer to acquire Yahoo last Friday for $45b.)

Following is an approximation of what I expect a Zimbra customer to receive regarding an upgrade.

Some date, 2010

Dear Microsoft Zimbra Customer:

The latest release of Zimbra (Zimbra 6.0) has been released to manufacturing today and will be available within 60 days.  As part of this release, we are renaming Zimbra 6.0 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.  The upgrade will be automatically delivered as part of your Zimbra license (sublicensed under the Microsoft Live Enterprise Support Service.)

If you are running the Zimbra desktop client, it will automatically be deleted and upgraded to Microsoft Outlook. If you are running the Zimbra Windows Mobile client, it will automatically be deleted and upgraded to Windows Mobile Mail.  If you are running any of the other Zimbra clients, including ones for Palm, Symbian, iPhone, or Blackberry, they will simply stop working and you will need to upgrade to a Windows Mobile Device.

Please back up your data as we can not assure you that it will be transferred.

I have been a hardcore Outlook user for a long time.  I grimaced with empathy as I read through Stan James 67 Reasons That Outlook Sucks.  If you are having a frustrating Outlook day, Stan’s rant will make you feel better.

Brilliant strategic move by Microsoft today – offering a price for Yahoo that is both well above the market clearing price and done out in the open.  Microsoft’s Letter to Yahoo is great.  It coincides with Terry Semel leaving the Yahoo board, which is a small irony.

In other news, Microsoft is now the rumored buyer of the 432-acre Sun (Storagetek) campus just outside of Boulder.  And apparently the bloom is finally coming off of the Google rose.

I love this industry.  It is so endlessly entertaining.  I don’t have to watch the E! Channel or read People Magazine anymore to get my daily dose of drama.

Today the news started emerging that Office 2003 SP3 no longer supports older Microsoft Office file formats.  When I first read this, I figured it only referred to really obscure formats.  But I was wrong – it’s step 7 in trying to get everyone to use Microsoft’s OpenXML format.  WTF?  Has someone lost their mind?

My IT guy Ross has been having his fair share of them lately.  Ross has been blogging about silly Microsoft tricks, including Microsoft you’re about to lose me and Why Microsoft, why?

Ross isn’t limiting himself to bitching about things – he’s also offering useful suggestions such as Disabling Vista auto update.  Plus he’s writing about some obscure stuff such as Installing Vista on a MacBook Pro using Imagex.exe (only obscure if you don’t want to do it!)

I’ll continue to endlessly torture Ross by saying "hey Ross, can you …"  Hopefully he will continue to write about his experiences.  If you have an inner IT guy within your soul, or if you are an end user who just wants to hear about someone who is banging their head on the wall trying to get this crap to work quietly in the background, hang with Ross.