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Google Previews App Engine
An anonymous reader writes "Google is giving a handful of web programmers the opportunity to create and run their own Web applications on their servers. Today's launch of a preview release of Google App Engine signals a new era of collaboration with third-party software developers. 'The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new Web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users," said Google product manager, Paul McDonald in a blog post."
Google's offering is more like a web framework hosted on Google's servers. Much different.
Originally, I thought that this would be a great competitor for EC2, but in reality it's very different.
EC2 allows you to configure a GNU/Linux environment to your liking and use it almost the same as you would use a dedicated server or VPS. Google's App Engine allows you to create Google Applications. They're written in Python (one of Google's production languages) and need to be written specifically to use things like Google's Bigtable.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Google's infrastructure is top notch, but don't expect to try and launch the next Web 2.0 app this way. If you use Google's App Engine, your only course is independent or being bought by Google - because you'd have to rewrite so much of your app to migrate to other infrastructure. With EC2, it's decently easy to switch to dedicated servers. S3 could be replaced by a MogileFS cluster. That's much more appealing to anyone that isn't Google.
Essentially, Google's App Engine locks you into Google in a way that EC2/S3 doesn't lock you into Amazon (in fact, some of the considerations like lack of persistent storage make it easier to move away).
The SDK includes a standalone web server, so if you decide to move it off of Google's service, all you need to do is find somewhere to run that server. If you have a DNS entry for your app then you're probably a click away from moving it. Just run the dev server...
What you get from Google is the free hosting and access to the Google hardware. It might not be long before other providers offer Google App Engine hosting - it could become a standard. It looks like Django on steroids...
I think this move is being mis-characterized by a lot of people. I actually think this is a very clever move by Google, and a taste of the future.
One of the key ways Microsoft won the desktop OS wars was basically making it easy for developers to create applications for it. Google has realised that the focus for application development is moving from the desktop to the web. If they can create a system that makes it easy for developers to create web based applications, then developers are going to integrate what they develop with Google services, effectively giving Google the kind of lock-in that Microsoft had with the web.
I don't know why people keep comparing this to Amazon's EC2. This I think is very different, both technically and strategically, and it is all about providing online developers with a rich way to incorporate Google services into their applications.
I'm quite excited at this announcement. Basically they are offering me:
- A system on which I can create and deploy applications that will always scale automatically, the only difference when doubling my traffic being the invoice I get by the end of the month. I don't have to deal with engineering or choosing a safely scalable application framework, looking, paying and dealing with a scalable application server, database, shared storage system (e.g. a SAN) and load balancer, run and maintain a fast network, perform backups, etc. All I do is write and run the application as I need.
- A system where such costs (application server, database, storage, load balancing, network and backups) scale perfectly with the actual use (and presumably profit) of my application, without having to make any huge investments.
- A system that will allow me to start for free and try it all, or just work freely for my hobby community, granting me no less than 500 MB. The competition today consists of a handful sub-par free hosts with 50 MB, a crappily configured PHP 4.3 and don't ask for speed or availability.
- Integration with Google applications (GMail; presumably, with all of them in the future).
- A standarized development environment based on a truly high-level, productive, modern language (not that Java business crap, but something that actually allows you to work fast and smart).
Google hosting it? I couldn't give a damn. My applications are usually GPL, including the business ones. It's not the application what's sold, it's the development and the service, and even if it were the application, I would trust Google as much as I would trust any other host.
The only caveat I see would be the datastore, which is not a relational database supporting SQL, but I'd have to see how good it is. At least it supports transactions, which are the single most difficult feature to implement in your own storage system. Everything else is just comfort, and when you work in Python, a language with first-class functions, builtin lists and dictionaries, list comprehensions, generators, a real object system, decent properties, operator overloading, mixins and dynamic modification of anything, and a dozen more features traditional languages such as Java or PHP couldn't dream of, I'm not worried about being able to query my data comfortably.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Terms of Service and Program Policy (afaics, just the usual hosting rules: no porn, gambling, piracy, spam, malware, hate speech, etc).
Also, adwords are pretty much 'Step 1' in trying to cover hosting costs for a fledgling webapp.
If all Google wants in return for free-ish hosting is something most people do anyway, I'd imagine most people won't blink.
If nothing else, I'd imagine many niche discussion boards will transition to GAPE in short order, once vBulletin is ported.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Google Open Application Terminal Serving Engine
The point about App Engine is that it's based on Google technologies like BigTable and GFS (along with a bunch of others that I can't talk about, but are equally cool). The real saving is not on IT administration but on the enormous pain of scaling up your infrastructure as the site grows.
The IT industry is littered with companies that failed the scaling challenge and lost their advantage. Friendster is the canonical example. You really don't want to build a successful business and then see it fall over and die because you aren't equal to the challenge of resharding your MySQL databases every month.
But wait. There are other advantages. App Engine is really a platform for Google to expose its technology to others. Scalable databases is only one part of it. There are plenty of other advantages to running on top of the Google platform. I haven't had a chance to check out the videos yet, so I'd rather not shoot my mouth off, but seriously - the stuff we have here simplifies a *lot* of annoying goop that otherwise you'd have to handle yourself (managing datacenters being only one obvious example).
Having seen for myself what it takes to run a large, popular website at a high degree of availability, I'm pretty excited about the launch of this service (disclaimer: I work for Google but not on App Engine). It means people can spend more time writing interesting software and less time on crap like debugging database replication and figuring out the annoying parts of how to geocode Japanese street addresses - cuz we do it for you.