Google Apps Engine Gets SQL

oker writes "Google has finally added SQL to its cloud platform offering, Apps Engine. Until now, developers had to use the Datastore service, which provides a vendor lock-in threat and isn't supported by most existing software and libraries. The SQL service should definitely improve Apps Engine adoption. It is currently in limited preview mode."

Comments

Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[tech4]

Before Google Apps Engine had an edge with its free plans, but why would anyone seriously use it now when there are much more capable Amazon cloud and Microsoft Azure available? Those two are also Apple's choice for their iCloud, while Google's services are missing from that list.

There's practically nothing that Google offers that others don't (except for the price before), and they're still missing huge amount of stuff that their competitors offer, like htis addition of SQL just now tells. For example, Azure integrates beautifully with Visual Studio, Eclipse and other development tools so that platform is just great to develop with. Amazon on the other hand offers different services for different needs - you get the file hosting platform that scales extremely well, and then there's the traditional platform with databases, ability to run code and so on.. There's just nothing that Google Apps Engine offers, while still missing a lot what competitors cloud services have.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[rish87]

I mostly use AWS, but have tried app engine a while back. I get the feeling that if you're trying to do something that app engine supports, it is easier to do it there instead of rolling everything together on your own from the various AWS offerings. Basically AWS = many more options, App Engine = better support/interfacing for a smaller subset of functions.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[icebraining]

Well, EC2 is lower level, so you have to manage the whole stack. In App Engine they take care of managing everything up to your application - the OS, web server, app server, etc. And nothing stops you from using S3 with GAE.
I don't know Azure, though.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[BitZtream]

Yea, its really screwing people over when you start charging them for shit that you told them we're going to give away free for a while, then when we think its production ready we're going to charge for it ...

This is standard business practice for pretty much ANY business, if you didn't see this coming, you aren't qualified to make a statement about it because you simple don't know anything about running a business.

Also in the agreement that stated the price changes in the future was the part that said you'd have notice and given X amount of time when a service was going to be discontinued. If I recall correctly, the amount of time was 2 years, its not like they're just going to drop you into nothingness.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

Could you guys give the Google hating circlejerk a rest for a while? I know you're getting paid for it obviously, but it's getting kind of boring. Couldn't you find a job that doesn't involve trying to brainwash people?

Some of us value the integrity that Google has displayed over what Microsoft does. I view Amazon in the same light as Google. I'd be happy to use either of their services.

What products has Google discontinued recently? I remember they discontinued some really unpopular ones a good few years ago, and then they got rid of Wave recently.

*googles to check what happened to Wave*

Google Wave is no longer being developed as a standalone product
You can still log in, edit and export your waves, and wave.google.com will remain in service until there is another way to access your data.

Those bastards! I see why you hate them now! Oh wait, no I don't..

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not hate. It is a simple fair question of whether people use what is clearly an inferior product at this time. Do you not see that just now adding basic SQL support is a clear indication of that point?

    And if you say no google products have been recently discontinued, then you are either being willfully ignorant or a troll. I shouldn't even reply to you, but someone else with mod points saw fit to promote your particular line of BS.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, didn't they just change the way they bill stuff? like, if you have a club and the entrance is 20 dollar but the drinks are free and people just camp inside for days, it is best to change that system. in the same way I hear the app engine was used, the free stuff was used a whole lot and the non free bits were very optimized. maybe they should get a new thing to charge by every 3 months, that could lead to very well optimized things.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

PS MS are hardly known for keeping services going indefinitely. Even when that means essentially a whole bunch of devices. You shills use some pretty bizarre arguments..

From what I've seen, if Google discontinue something, it's because 1) nobody is using it, or 2) they're consolidating the functionality into another product.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen, if Google discontinue something, it's because 1) nobody is using it, or 2) they're consolidating the functionality into another product.

Sooo... kind of like what happened with PlaysForSure?

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[tdelaney]

My apps all fall under the free thresholds. The "little" guy really hasn't been hurt by the changes. Google listened, and increased the number of free instance-hours to 28, allowing a free app to have a single idle instance all the time, with occasional spikes.

You do need to configure this though - I personally think that any free app should be automatically configured to be max 1 idle instance and maximum queue time.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/09/few-adjustments-to-app-engines-upcoming.html

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Braino420]

Well, EC2 is lower level, so you have to manage the whole stack.

I think a more apt comparison to App Engine would be AWS' Elastic Beanstalk.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[dolmant_php]

I disagree that app engine offers nothing more than the other services. The offerings are different types of services. As proof: app engine comes with the following basic services: blobstore, memcache, database, auto-scaling. Amazon web services has options for all of these, yes, but they are all separate services: S3 (blobstore), memcache (elasticache), simple db (database), auto-scaling (cloud watch). In AWS, I have to configure all of these systems independently of the others, and pay for them, too. I have to worry about upgrades, operating systems, etc. In google app engine, all of this is bundled in already. AWS does have all of the functionality, but it requires lots more setup. After all is said and done, GAE is actually priced very competitively, and even cheaper than, its competitors.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[rosciol]

It seems clear you haven't tried App Engine. You mention Azure's integration with Eclipse as something which competitors have that Google doesn't, except that the Google Eclipse plugin has provided the same (and dare I say better) integration with the Eclipse environment since App Engine launched, which was well before Azure. You then go on to allude to "services" that Amazon provides, which if you're referring to EC2 is a bit like comparing Gmail to exim4 with mutt, and if you're referring to the other AWS, is just plain wrong. There is no "traditional platform" with EC2; there's merely what you build, or what you tie into with web calls. In the former case, it's worth noting that the reason many people turn to App Engine, or Azure, is that they don't want to manage their own system images; they just want to run a program. In the latter case, you can use any of the AWS services that have web protocols with App Engine just fine, and many people do.

If you want to make a more reasonable comparison, it's App Engine versus Azure versus Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Azure supports .Net and PHP, AEB supports Java, and App Engine supports Python, Java (and any JVM compatible language), and Go. App Engine clearly has more language support. While I'm not aware of the speed with which Azure scales, GAE's scaling speed is far faster than Amazon. AEB uses the same instance startup procedure as Amazon EC2, which in the FAQ lists that an instance will be available "within ten minutes". GAE creates new instances on the fly and startup time is measured in milliseconds for fine tuned or simple applications and seconds otherwise. GAE also provides command line tools for all three of its language environments, so you are not tied to any development environment.

I'm really perplexed by this "huge amount of stuff" that other people offer. The only thing I can think of is the ability to dynamically tailor the system your program runs on, but if that's what you want, you're shopping for EC2 and other virtualization solutions like Rack Space, not Azure/AEB/GAE. If you're looking for platform-as-a-service because you understand the tradeoffs that you're entering into, those three are the main players in town. Of those three, GAE wins hands down in my opinion. Not only does it support more languages and programming styles (frontend / backend code can be separated and used for different types of instances) than either Azure or AEB, the value added services make programming many types of applications simpler (and they can all be avoided if lockin is feared). Azure requires you to program in Windows with their tools, and who wants to be required to do that? AEB has all the slowness of EC2 without the configurability, so it seems you'd be better off with either Azure or GAE no matter what.

Take a tiny amount of time to understand what you're criticizing next time.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[oakgrove]

Sooo... kind of like what happened with PlaysForSure?

Actually, no.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

Yeah, I guess you wouldn't be able to feel anything after a decade of being ruptured by Microsoft..

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[dotancohen]

Before Google Apps Engine had an edge with its free plans, but why would anyone seriously use it now when there are much more capable Amazon cloud and Microsoft Azure available?

The Amazon cloud offerings win on more than just specs. I have a Paypal credit card, but I don't live in the US. Thus, getting the physical plastic card to me is a hassle as I have to route it through someone in the US. That means that I've now been without my card for two months, and my Amazon bill has gone unpaid. When I got the "we're going to shut you down if you don't pay" letter, I wrote back explaining the situation and asked that they defer my payment until November with interest.

How did Amazon handle that? They didn't defer my payment: they waived it outright! Granted that I've been a customer since almost the beginning and these charges were for under a dollar at my current usage level, however, what other company would go that far? Amazon has won itself a customer for life and I'm more than happy to spread the goodwill that they've demonstrated.

Would Microsoft waive two months payment? Would Google? At their own initiative, after the customer asked only for deferment?

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

A simple fair question is fine - but these 2 posts repeatedly post their pro-MS (and I think pro Facebook, can't remember), anti-Google lines. It's clearly past the stage of ramptant fanboi, and into "we're getting paid to do this".

I admit that I'm quite a fan of Amazon and Google. I used to be a fan of Apple up until about 2000. I don't consider Amazon and Google infallible, but they've never caused me any problems so far, and I think they're having a positive effect on the world.

With MS and Apple, I'm ambivalent (this means of mixed opinion, not neutral opinion in case anyone thinks it's the same as apathetic..). They do make good products sometimes (this used to be pretty rare for MS, though Apple have always made pretty good products, just marketed them wrong while Steve was gone in the 90s I guess), but they also do a lot of what could be termed as Evil when it comes to how they treat consumers.

You shouldn't twist people's words so much (then again, you're quite possibly one of the original posters, so I'm not that surprised). I didn't say that no Google products had been recently discontinued - I asked a genuine question, because I don't know. Please enlighten me. Often these shills just say stuff that has no evidence behind it. I'd rather see some facts rather than strawman half-truths.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

* first line was meant to say "but these 2 posters"

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

My original comment was meant to say that they essentially bricked a whole load of devices, but I screwed up the tags. No matter how you try to twist things, Google haven't done anything like that. And if they did, I doubt it would be in quite as dramatically ironic fashion. "Plays For Sure" indeed..

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[DragonWriter]

Before Google Apps Engine had an edge with its free plans, but why would anyone seriously use it now when there are much more capable Amazon cloud and Microsoft Azure available?

What Google offers with App Engine (which still has the same distinction between free apps and apps with billing enabled as it has since billable features were first introduced) is not really directly competing with EC2, its more directly competing with services like Heroku that are built on top of EC2.

Compared to EC2, there's a lot lower barrier to use in terms of what you need to implement yourself (or get from somewhere other than the vendor).

The App Engine Python Runtime is one of the dead-simplest ways to get a cloud application up (Heroku with Ruby is roughly comparable in ease, there used to be a roughly comparable JavaScript-based option that has since shifted its focus and dropped the comparable service.)

For example, Azure integrates beautifully with Visual Studio, Eclipse and other development tools so that platform is just great to develop with.

Google has fairly extensive Eclipse tooling which supports Google technologies including, but not limited to, the App Engine Java runtime.

The Python and Go runtimes don't have specific IDE tooling, but IME Python, at least, doesn't need the tooling to start with.

Amazon on the other hand offers different services for different needs - you get the file hosting platform that scales extremely well, and then there's the traditional platform with databases, ability to run code and so on..

Google also provides a number of cloud services for different needs. Its a radically different set than what Amazon offers, so the needs each fulfill are quite different.

There's just nothing that Google Apps Engine offers

That's true, there is no such product as "Google Apps Engine". OTOH, the product "Google App Engine" offers a number of things (including integration with other Google cloud services.)

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[TooMuchToDo]

Any company would buy goodwill if it cost them less than a dollar.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[dotancohen]

I don't know about that. I've had to swear off some places for less than a dollar for sure. The Amazon rep didn't know that I'd go on /. telling about the incident, in fact, I'm surprised that the rep had the authority to do what he did at all.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Kalriath]

What the hell are you talking about? PlaysForSure is the certification platform upon which something called the Windows Media Rights Manager was built. The WMRM is the server side software that generates licenses for "protected" content for delivery to Windows Media Player, or anything else that happens to support it. WMRM is still available to license (at no charge, may I add) along with the PlaysForSure logo for third party MP3 players. That's not "discontinued" by any stretch of the term, and did not "brick" any devices whatsoever. As you say, "you shills use some pretty bizarre arguments".

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Kalriath]

They likely have delegated authority for small amounts which they can use in a sales capacity. In general though, your offer to defer with interest would have costed more in administration costs than simply waiving it, and disconnecting you for less than a dollar is a major PR risk. Not to say Amazon doesn't have very good customer service - they do (I have a Kindle 3G with a damaged screen, out of warranty, and they say they'll replace it for $85 which comes with a new warranty and everything - they sure know how to keep customers) - but ... er, actually, my tangent answered it. Amazon knows how to keep customers.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[somersault]

I'm not a shill because I don't get paid to write half truths. Disliking Microsoft is just something that I've been doing for years before I'd heard of the internet. That makes me a kind of anti-fanboi or something, but not a shill.

Seems you're right, and that my "knowledge" of this area actually comes from sensationalist Slashdot headlines/comments at the time of the PlaysForSure debacle.

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[dotancohen]

Amazon knows how to keep customers.

That is why I like dealing with them!

Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure?

[Kalriath]

Oh, nothing wrong with disliking Microsoft (or Apple, or Google - OK, I admit it, I don't actually really like any of them). I just wouldn't go trusting Slashdot headlines as authoritative sources of truth for anything regarding The Big Three tech companies. There's always an angle.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Develop my app around it, only to have Google discontinue it and leave me hanging. Fool me once, Google...

Re:Sure...

[BitZtream]

Except ... they lay out in their ToS that they give you a minimum amount of notice so you can move off if they discontinue a service. For AppEngine, thats 2 years I believe, and Google App Engine is not the only way to run apps for Google App Engine, you can also use the alternative OSS stack that will serve app engine apps: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

So ... if two years and a free alternative (free as in beer and speech) is 'leave me hanging' then you don't really belong in the tech industry, you won't make it.

Re:Sure...

[darth dickinson]

Run along, kid. The adults are talking.

App Engine

[Anonymous Coward]

App Engine, not Apps Engine.

Who uses app engine?

[perbu]

I think this is a good thing, but I'm still baffled by people actually using it. AFAIK there is no escape hatch, no way of getting a little special component to run. Say, your app suddenly needs Stunnel, Varnish or HA-Proxy, what do you do? I'm guessing you don't want to tie the app down across two data centers. Anyone ever used App Engine that might supply us with some actual experience?

Re:Who uses app engine?

[rosciol]

I think you misunderstand the point of App Engine. Varnish and HA-Proxy are things that are installed on servers to improve their performance. The idea behind using GAE is to remove yourself from needing applications of that variety at all. Using GAE, you don't have to worry about the server hardware, the operating system, the load balancer, caching, or any other system details; you just run a program. If fine tuning system architecture is your idea of fun, or is critical for your particular application, then by all means stay away from GAE.

If, however, thinking about these system architecture concerns makes your head hurt, as it does mine, and you just want to get your application running, then use GAE. GAE abstracts scalability; that is the point of the platform. You're paying Google to use their know-how to make your simple Python / Java / Go program run and work for request volumes in the 1 per minute range to the 100 per second range. To me, that is what makes GAE amazing and worthwhile.

I am a researcher, and I don't have the time or energy to spend on managing servers or configuring, updating, and ensuring reliability of operating systems. I want a PaaS architecture that removes me from the hardware and operating system levels. Those pieces of the puzzle are not relevant to me, and dealing with them just saps time and energy from what I actually want to focus on. What I want is somewhere where I can hand off the code that is relevant to my application and know that the program, and the servers it reside on, will continue to operate for any load level twenty four hours a day. For my purposes, it's perfect. I am hard pressed to imagine that any but the largest players derive their competitive advantage from their server infrastructure, so, to me, not having to worry about it just frees up limited resources to focus on what's important.

Re:Who uses app engine?

[DragonWriter]

I think this is a good thing, but I'm still baffled by people actually using it. AFAIK there is no escape hatch, no way of getting a little special component to run. Say, your app suddenly needs Stunnel, Varnish or HA-Proxy, what do you do?

It doesn't happen, because Stunnel, Varnish, and HA-Proxy aren't things that an app needs, they are thing that an infrastructure layer might use to support functions that the Google App Engine platform already provides. You use App Engine because you distribution management handled behind the scenes by the platform, so you don't need those kinds of tools.

Admittedly, this sacrifices the flexibility to pick and choose your own solutions for those kind of low-level features, but that's something some people want so that they can focus on the core functionality of their apps.

Re:Who uses app engine?

[raylu]

While I agree with your post in general, you don't have to derive your competitive advantage from your server infrastructure to not use a PaaS. Sometimes it's just difficult to abstract away all of those things (hardware, OS, other details).

Alternatively, you're a business that simply deals with requests beyond the 100 per second range; this doesn't make you one of the largest players in 2011.

Fixed lockin the wrong way

[FunkyELF]

Instead of allowing SQL which will probably never be a first class citizen, they should have opened their existing platform.

There is a good video of the Joyent CEO bashing Google at a panel with a Google representative right there.

Re:Fixed lockin the wrong way

[mgiuca]

There is AppScale, an open source implementation of App Engine which can run App Engine apps on your own web server -- that helps to mitigate the lock-in. I thought I read that a Google employee was behind at least the datastore implementation (but not doing it on Google's time).

Frankly, I think it's in Google's interest to make sure that App Engine apps are portable. That would be consistent with their philosophy of "we don't lock you in; we hope you stay because our service is the best."

Re:Fixed lockin the wrong way

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly would like you opened?

App Engine is a thin layer on top of Google's proprietary infrastructure. BlobStore, Bigtable, Megastore, their job scheduling system. These are the same systems that are used to build GMail, Google+ and all the other Google apps. Opening it up would be the same as opening the entire google platform which is a ridiculous request.

Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"

[Oswald McWeany]

Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"? Don't Apple legally own the word "App" now?

OK, I'm being a bit pretentious I know- but considering Apple went after people for having "App Stores" - how much different is "App Engine"?

Is this another stupid patent/copyright fight waiting to happen?

Re:Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"

[icebraining]

Considering it launched before the App Store, I'm pretty sure Apple won't be so stupid to sue them over it.

Re:Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Apple won't go after them because even if they win, they'll get their nose bloodied.

Re:Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"

[Lunix Nutcase]

Except it's not called "Apps Engine". Hell the linked article at the top says "Google App Engine Blog".

Re:Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"

[BitZtream]

Well, considering App Engine was available to the public about 3 months before the App Store, I'd say Google would win that one.

Actually SQL?

[drx]

The blogpost mentions a "familiar MySQL environment" ... that's not much SQL.

Competition and Standards...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Competition and Standards are wonderful things.

Re:Competition and Standards...

[blair1q]

So you're saying it's a good thing that they're competing their proprietary mindset against your open one.

Privacy

[kangsterizer]

Gotta love pushing away data to those various cloud data provider.

I hope some people encrypt stuff and store in blobs (albeit, I'm sure, somewhere in the agreement this must be forbidden for funny reasons)

Re:Privacy

[icebraining]

If your application is running on the same engine has the data storage, as in GAE, encrypting it doesn't really protect it from the provider.

Re:Privacy

[swillden]

I hope some people encrypt stuff and store in blobs (albeit, I'm sure, somewhere in the agreement this must be forbidden for funny reasons)

It's not forbidden at all. It's not very useful, though, because you have to decrypt the data sometime. If you do it in your code running on GAE then you might as well not have bothered. You can do it on the end-user's browser, in Javascript, but that doesn't make sense for many apps.

It's "App Engine"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not "Apps Engine". Come on, people!

Now add PHP.

[afabbro]

PHP is the #1 requested feature for GAE and has been for several years. And Google has pretty much said no. BTW, perl is #3 and ruby is #4.

That is what people want. If I can take my app and move it to GAE, then it might be interesting. If I have to rewrite it in Java or Python...quite a bit less so. Sure, if I have a Java and Python app - and the man-hours to inevitably rewrite parts of it to work with GAE - then maybe I'm interested. Or if I'm starting from scratch, maybe. But honestly there are so many options for running code in the cloud (everything from a simple VPS to EC2) that having to shoe-horn what I want to do into what Google lets me do is a non-starter.

BTW, is the SQL actually MySQL? Or is it "some subset of MySQL mixed with some unique other things we added". If the latter, then again I'm a whole lot less interested. I'm interested in working on my app, not rewriting its DB layer.

Re:Now add PHP.

[42forty-two42]

If all you want to do is run an existing app in "the cloud", EC2 is a better choice for you. App Engine is designed around the philosophy that "We'll make scaling magically happen; but you need to obey our rules." These rules, for the large part, are designed to make scaling easier - all the seemingly-weird limitations in the datastore are there because they implicitly force you to shard your data early on. Since you'll be customizing your database layer for app engine, the logic goes, providing all kinds of programming languages isn't as important (since you might as well customize the rest of your app, right?) The other concern Google might have is sandboxing - they've done some fairly extensive modifications to Python, Java, and Go to get the kind of sandboxing that they need, and given PHP's not-so-stellar security history, they might not be as interested in supporting it. Heck, even if sandboxing worked well enough, I could see them saying "No, we don't want to support PHP because it's harder to write secure apps in PHP, and our entire philosophy in App Engine is to make the easy thing the right thing to do."

Re:Now add PHP.

[DragonWriter]

BTW, is the SQL actually MySQL?

You know, I could find that answer in probably about as much time as it to took you to ask it. I mean, this is slashdot, you'd think people could use the web. RTFFAQ.

Re:Now add PHP.

[shutdown -p now]

Google banned the mental plague that is PHP from their "cloud"? That's awesome, I see that they're really keen on that "do no evil" thing.

WRONG Google APP is not the same of Google APPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Google App is the developer equivalent to amazon. NOT DOMAIN HOSTING

Google apps is the structure of domain hosting and similar, NOT APPLICATION HOSTING.

Rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're using MySQL under the hood, then maybe Oracle won't be able to kill it.

There's no such thing as a free lunch

[chicago_scott]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch

Google vs Amazon Platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the lines can get blurred and there are "gray areas", it seems to me that comparing Amazon ('IAAS') and Google ('PAAS') is a classic "apples and oranges" comparison.