Google App Engine

Posted April 10, 2008 at 8:02 pm by Bart van de Garde in Cloud Computing, Infrastructure.

It may not be totally hot any longer, as I just saw it on news site www.nu.nl, but yesterday word came about Google App Engine. You could look at it as the answer to Amazon AWS, Werner Vogels dedicated an interesting session to at The Next Web last Friday. With a different line of approach, though.

Amazon focuses on offering storage and raw computing power based on a web service interface. Google’s App Engine is on a slightly different level. It offers a framework that can only (at present) run Python applications. Amazon focuses more on ‘raw’ and broadly usable infrastructure components, while Google focuses more on specific application levels.

Google App Engine is really a developer SDK, where in no time you can deploy custom applications to Google’s infrastructure. With this, Google makes an interesting promise: scaling will be done on the fly without any required effort by users or indication in advance to the amount of capacity required. Right now, Google ‘promises’ 5 million free page views per month, which is absolutely impressive!

If you’re a Python buff, this is probably great news, but I must say I was somewhat disappointed as it is, at least for now, Python only. I would have liked to have been an early-adaptor of this service, but unfortunately I am a Python illiterate. Google, however, indicates the infrastructure is designed for multiple languages support in the future. As a fan of Ruby on Rails I have my hopes up Ruby will be the next supported language.

I think for now Amazon and Google are not contradictory. Market developments will become really interesting when they will be in each other’s hair more. As I see it, for the time being Google will be more accessible to developers who want to create something fast without thinking about infrastructure. Amazon services are more focussed on those who do want to think about infrastructure but maybe prefer not to do everything themselves (as they may have done before) and for those Amazon components fit well.

Maybe with the exception of Amazon’s S3, to my opinion, services are mainly focussed on web applications for large-scale (public) internet applications. Lacking things such as relational databases, clear infrastructure security, and SLAs for services, I expect it will be quite a while before services offered by these internet giants will mostly be used for professional internet applications.

At Jitscale we look at these developments primarily as supplementary to possibilities to make internet applications optimally available, secure and scalable.