Google Previews App Engine 167
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."
Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Jokes aside, if done right, this thing can bring Google to the position of total control over a large part of the Internet, which is a bit scary, to say it mildly..
Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth) (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft, take note (Score:4, Insightful)
If I where working at Microsoft development I'd be shitting my pants right about now (imagine pictures of Ballmer dancing and screaming "developers! developers! developers!" here). This is clearly what google's after now that they own search (and web advertising). They have been building huge datacenters for a while now, they own probably one of the largest distributed computing systems on earth (and know how to keep it up and running), *and* they own parts of the netwerk that connects it all together (fibre etc.).
And now they are offering all web developers the ability to use this infrastructure..
On the other hand, I do see some important privacy and security concerns here. If I owned a company, I'm not sure I'd trust all my source code, data etc. to be stored on Google's servers, which are (in my case) even in a completely different country with different laws, jurisdiction etc. Not to mention, what if I later want to migrate because I don't like the terms of service, etc. Or, what happens if you would create anything that takes off and Google decides that they like it..
Re:Microsoft, take note (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft, take note (Score:3, Insightful)
Coding is never holy grail...it is a combination of the initial idea and the (often more importantly) the implementation of that idea that make or break a company.
No business that creates an application within the currently published infrastructure of Google Apps Engine is going to have enough rocket science in it to worry about having it stolen by Google (or any competent set of developers).
Do you really want to give your code to Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
A lot of talk is made about making web applications scalable, but in reality, you're not likely to have 200 million users overnight. Facebook and MySpace have about 50 million users a piece, and the reason that they can't scale is because everyone who works at those places is a moron. I mean MySpace runs on Windows and SQLServer, and then they wonder why they can't handle the traffic, or there application is exposing bugs to end-users at a rate of tens of thousands per second.
If you can't support a web application with a million concurrent users, and 50k transactions a second on a $4000 piece of hardware, then that generally means one of four things is wrong:
1. You're paying way too much for hardware.
2. Your DB Server is slow as hell. For high performance try PostgreSQL or MySQL instead of Oracle/SQLServer.
3. You application platform sucks. Try J2EE/Model 2. I've worked with everything you can imagine and Struts 1/Velocity smokes any other web-application framework out there. On average, It's about 10,000 times faster than CGI/PERL. Don't believe me? Quit being a fan boy and actually do some experimenting yourself[1]. Try doing some load testing against the same application implemented in different languages and see for yourself.
4. Your code sucks. Try picking up some books on Design Patterns. If you can't tell me what a Flyweight is or explain how process and threading models work on your particular platform, then you shouldn't be writing web-applications.
[1] That's why they call it computer science not computer religion.
Unless someone implements Google App Engine on EC2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do you really want to give your code to Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Quit confusing people with facts." - Bill O' Reilly
Re:Very Different from EC2 (Score:4, Insightful)
http://simonwillison.net/2008/Apr/8/forms/ [simonwillison.net]
I would imagine that someone will also write some code to sit between your app and database, pretending to be the data backend that Google is providing, simplifying migration away from teh Goog.
Re:Unless someone implements Google App Engine on (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't see any lock in, and the major downside appears to be the need to expose your source to google.
The future (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't? So you don't use any web hosting services then, you host everything yourself? But wait, then you are at the mercy of your ISP. So do you have redundant connections? But wait, you're still hosting everything in one place, so you are at the mercy of floods, earthquakes, power outages, etc. So do you have geographically separated offices, with employees at both locations to look after everything?
Yes, there's something to be said for independence. But hosting providers, especially large international ones like Google, offer a lot that would be prohibitively expensive for you to do yourself.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft, take note (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:flawed business model (Score:4, Insightful)
And those cheap hosting plans don't provide any sort of scaling. If you want to scale, you have to move to their dedicated servers, which cost just as much as everyone elses. Want to scale past a single dedicated server? You're on your own. They'll sell 'em to you, but load ballancing, database sharding... that's all on you.
This offer is unique. There is no comparable platform on the market.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Startup farming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sign over your rights and trademarks to Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Looks good and free (for 500MB worth) (Score:5, Insightful)
>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.
It is geared towards solving some of the same problems as EC2 and S3 (how to deploy scalable web sites without having to build and maintain your own datacenters); however, it takes a different approach.
EC2 and S3 make you design your web stack from the ground up, choose your operating system, etc. They also let you run whatever kind of task you want, including stuff that runs in the background.
In contrast google app store limits your options, and provides it's own web framework, but is probably easy to get started with since they already handle things like load balancing for you, and starts your service up on a new machine if one crashes automatically, etc.
A lot of people have noted that you have to use python to develop, and that is one way that it lacks the flexibility of amazon's offering, but it is by far the least important! Google will doubtless add support for things like java and ruby in the future, as for them it is just an issue or wrapping an API.
The biggest concern that most people are missing is that this is a essentially a really big web server that they are letting you put your software on, and *just* a web server. From "http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html":
"when an application is called to serve a web request, it must issue a response within a few seconds. If the application takes too long, the process is terminated and the server returns an error code to the user."
That means you can perform *no* computationally expensive operations on their service. Most interesting web applications don't just process web requests, they use data that has complicated processing done as part of batch tasks. Internet search is the best example of this. It's not enough to have a database with the whole internet in it, you also need to generate an index, and that is an incredibly expensive batch job that must run on an enourmous cluster. That means if you wanted to implement something big like search on google app engine, you would need to roll your own cluster and then upload your stuff to google, *over the internet*. This is not practical because the terabytes of data involved may be quick to transfer across a lan in a data center, it will take a long time to transfer them across the internet...
In comparison, amazon will let you use the same service and data store both for interactive web applications, and backend batch processes. You could theoretically reimplement google search on top of EC2 and S3, but probably not on top of google app engine.
That said, I think that google is going to kick everyone's ass in this space in the long run. Google hasn't come out with every feature necessary for building big apps without having to worry about scaling, but for the features they have implemented, they've done it right, making it much smoother for the developer by handling administrative tasks. In comparison amazon's efforts give you all of the primitive tools you need, but then require you to roll a lot more of your own code.
When they get around to letting external developers run mapreduces (http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html) and similar long term distributed tasks by paying for CPU usage, they will have the opportunity to move into this space in a big way.
Aside from that, they need to provide better tools to migrate existing web apps to their service. Most people aren't going to write something serious for google from scratch, but might be willing to port an existing app that is facing scaling issues to explore cost/benefits of google's service. Right now, porting is much easier with EC2 since you can just image your existing servers and build on that.
Google needs to provide:
1. Some kind of language independence. Right now, it sounds like (although I do not kn