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."

Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth)

[Tyball]

It looks very similar to Amazon's EC2 [amazon.com] hosted server service. They even have a simplified database system much like EC2. That in itself is enough to scare a lot of people away due to the pain of future migration.

It's actually nothing like EC2--EC2 is a virtualization platform. You run an entire machine image of your choice on Amazon's infrastructure, and there's no explicit persistent storage except through the Ec2 interface.

Google's offering is more like a web framework hosted on Google's servers. Much different.

Re:Uh, yeh right

[Anonymous Coward]

Statements implying inherit insecurities are useless. Some real information would be useful...if you really have any.

Very Different from EC2

[saterdaies]

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).

Re:Microsoft, take note

[Bazman]

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...

Re:Why?

[Chineseyes]

Because as a business owner you recognize the benefit of not having to invest in IT administration overhead?
So let me get this straight.. I leave myself at the mercy of google in order to save the cost of IT administration? That doesn't sound like a good business decision.

Because as a business owner, you recognize that Google is investing in your business by seeding your startup costs?
Startup costs? You can't be serious, both hardware and bandwidth are dirt cheap, in college (2000) between my four friends and I, we were able to start my first business using pocket money we earned from odd jobs. This is a VERY weak arguement.

Because as a software developer you recognize that leveraging the tools Google is offering (and will be adding to over time) will speed your time to delivery? I'd love an explanation on how this would speed up my time to delivery? I took a look at the video and read the article and it does nothing that I can't already do myself to speed up time to delivery other than have hardware resources readily available. But once again I leave myself at the mercy of Google for access hardware and bandwidth. Thanks but no thanks.

Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth)

[GXTi]

It's not really like EC2 at all. EC2 gives you a big fat slice of CPU, RAM, and disk - it's like renting a server. A beefy one.

GAPE (adopting the acronym from AccUser) is just a glorified virtual host. Not that it's a bad thing; that might be exactly what you need. EC2 is really more about computing power than the ability to serve up some webpages.

Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth)

[pubjames]

I don't think it is at all like EC2. This looks like it is going to be a complete application development environment for web apps. EC2 is just a way to deploy servers online for whatever you want.
 

Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth)

[*weasel]

6.3. Except as provided in Section 8, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content or the Application that you create, submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Service, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content and the Application (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.

8.1. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content or Application. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Content and/or Application, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content on or through the Service you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Content for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy. Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy.

8.2. You agree that Google, in its sole discretion, may use your trade names, trademarks, service marks, logos, domain names and other distinctive brand features in presentations, marketing materials, customer lists, financial reports and Web site listings (including links to your website) for the purpose of advertising or publicizing your use of the Service.

Terms of Service [google.com] and Program Policy [google.com] (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.

Re:This is made of win and awesome

[42forty-two42]

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.

Note that transactions are semi-limited - you have to loosely partition your data into smallish chunks, and any given transaction can only act within one chunk. (There's no performance penalty to having /too small/ chunks, and indeed the default is to put each row in its own chunk. But if chunks are too large performance will suffer) Presumably they're only implementing transactions as a local-to-database-replica thing; none of that fancy two-phase commit stuff.

Re:This is made of win and awesome

[protohiro1]

The experts you are talking to are wrong (I worked on an app until a week ago that did huge joins millions of times a day, using oracle RAC). Joins in the db scale much better than doing joins in the app. The real issue is that some data really isn't all that relational, so a non-relational db like BigTable is very appropriate and much, much faster than a relational db. If you need to do joins in your application design you can't really do it on a non-relational db.