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Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud
jamie found a post laying to rest one potential criticism of Google's App Engine, that of the danger of lock-in to the platform. Waxy.org points out a hack called AppDrop, written by Chris Anderson, that provides a container for Google App SDK applications, running entirely on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Here's Anderson's AppDrop page and his blog post announcing it.
The Rolling Stones.
-Peter
PS: Remember, there's no "I don't get it." moderation option.
Thank you for the link to this "Matrix" movie! I had not heard of it.
On a related note, amazon adds permanent storage functionality to EC2:
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html
It's pretty obvious an AppEngine emulation layer was destined for EC2+S3. I'm not sure there's any benefit left to Google's service except maybe the price. Although with the waiting lines it's not like anyone can even use it anyway.
Yet another pulled punch from Google. I think everyone realizes it isn't infallible now. But we're all too damn afraid to say it because of what would happen when the collective ego stroking ends. If we all started hating Google, its employees would have to find new ways to attain job satisfaction (read: making obscene money by raping users that hate their company either way).
They were originally 5 separate links, but since the post, Google has bought two of the other sites...
CF
Unlike google, they don't really have any technology to scale. ec2 does not count of course, because I doubt their app sdk scales.
Anyone can run the google sdk on their machine. you can download it straight from google.
Google's main lock in is that they run a scalable service that no one, not even amazon, is coming close to.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
"Error: Hey you, get off of my cloud!"
You never expect irony, do you?
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The main irritation I have with EC2 is that it's too low-level, but it does mean it can run just about anything, including App Engines.
App Engines will not, however, be able to run EC2. (Kind of obvious, if you know anything about either of them.)
However, I think you lose the main benefit of using App Engines if you put them on EC2 -- that being that Google gets to worry about scaling. With EC2, you have to do everything yourself, including detecting load and deciding whether or not to fire up another instance. With App Engines, you just upload your app and watch it go, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Put App Engines on EC2, and you suddenly have to build an infrastructure to support it.
So it's nice to know your app is portable, at least, but I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting this, other than as a way to keep Google on their toes -- if Google really does start to be evil, this is a nice way to port away from them.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There is a free virtual appliance available for development purposes: Google AppEngine JumpBox
The main benefit of running an app on Google's AppEngine is that the data will be stored in Google's highly scalable storage infrastructure (presumably BigTable). As far as I can see, this new service doesn't run Google's BigTable because Google has not released code for it. Without that element, there's really no point running this on EC2. You may as well take advantage of the full power of EC2 and run your own LAMP stack or Ruby on Rails or whatever, instead of limiting yourself to Google's app engine API. You'll also have the benefit of being able to port your service to *any* Linux hosting provider.
"Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud"
Not only would this sentence have been incomprehensible 10 years ago, but almost every single word in it would have been as well!
These aren't boring times, people.
The emulator appears to work by downloading big chunks of the runtime environment from Google. That doesn't remove "lock in", because Google has both legal and technical means for stopping that.
What is needed is either an open source implementation, or for Google to release the runtime in open source form.