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Programming IT Technology

Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud 39

Posted by kdawson from the ionized-path-between-the-clouds dept.
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.
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Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud More

Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud

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  • Queue (Score:3, Funny)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Monday April 14, 2008 @06:58PM (#23071632) Homepage Journal
    The Rolling Stones.

    -Peter

    PS: Remember, there's no "I don't get it." moderation option.
    • LOL "get off my cloud".
      Took me a while...

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Siridar ( 85255 )
      I'm guessing that the +funny mods are the slashdot equivalent of the kid in your class who would go "hahahaha...wait, I don't get it..."

      In my case, I _was_ that kid.

      • It's 'Cue' not 'Queue' (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I keep seeing this: you mean "Cue", not "queue". Internet word choice police is on the case. "Cue the tiny violins" vs. "Queue up here for crumpets and tea".
    • If you're going to misspell 'cue' as 'queue', I reserve the right to randomly post John Otway and Wild Willie Barrett [youtube.com], since the song has a queue (for a bus) in it.

      Miles better than wrinkly old rubberlips :P

  • amazon adds permanent storage functionality to EC2 (Score:5, Informative)

    by centinall ( 868713 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @07:17PM (#23071780)
    On a related note, amazon adds permanent storage functionality to EC2:

    http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html [typepad.com]
  • How about running them on a platform that doesn't require a waitlist or an invite system (and with the same scale).

    Oh, wait...

  • +1 invevitable (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 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 attai

  • Not even close (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slashkitty ( 21637 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @07:45PM (#23072034) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hahah. I love this complaining. OMG, lock-in through competence!! So you should only choose mediocre, poorly scaling services because they are a dime-a-dozen, and therefore interchangeable.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by LS ( 57954 )

      Anyone can run the google sdk on their machine. you can download it straight from google.
      What pisses me off is that NO YOU CAN'T. All this debate and hooha about Google's App engine and it's not even open to the public.

  • Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)

    by SoundGuyNoise ( 864550 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @08:06PM (#23072200) Homepage
    "Error: Hey you, get off of my cloud!"

  • Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Monday April 14, 2008 @08:26PM (#23072354) Journal
    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.

  • Google App Engine Virtual Appliance (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @08:39PM (#23072450)
    There is a free virtual appliance available for development purposes: Google AppEngine JumpBox [jumpbox.com]

  • Does this service provide BigTable? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:49PM (#23073042)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Read the article. No it doesn't support BigTable. It uses a flat data file on 1 server. It also doesn't support Google authentication services.

    • 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).

      Google AppEngine's Datastore API seems (currently) less featurific than Amazon's (also highly scalable) SDB, and could probably be implemented easily on top of SDB if you really wanted too -- or you could just use SDB from an AppEngine application running on EC2 (or, for that matter, running on Google's servers) and get the additional functionalit

  • 10 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gorimek ( 61128 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2008 @02:27AM (#23074500) Homepage
    "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.

  • doesn't remove lock-in (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nguy ( 1207026 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2008 @02:38AM (#23074556)
    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.
  • Presumably, the only real requirement Google's App Engine requires of applications that run on it is that they speak CGI.

    From there, one can choose to use the APIs they provide to their persistence layers and other services -- or not.

    Assuming one can abstract out the implementation details of those APIs in their application's framework, then it should be possible to make the application code portable. Extracting the data means you'll have to write a quick script to back it all up -- which one would be doing

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