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.

+1 invevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Not even close

[slashkitty]

They are just trying to lock in some users themselves.

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.

Does this service provide BigTable?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

10 years ago...

[Gorimek]

"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.