Apr 07 2008
Web Computing: Google announces App Engine
Very timely with my posts of late regarding web computing, Google has announced at the latest Campfire One event the initial unveiling of their web computing strategy. It is dubbed Google App Engine.
The TC guys attended and have their writeup here.
Even though I am soooooo not a fan of the Big G, it is great to see them finally toss their hat in the ring. I have no doubt that this will be great for developers by forcing MS and IBM to get their act together within the next few quarters as well as give Amazon some competitive fire in their belly even though this is definitely not a threat to AWS in the near future.
Arrington mentions that the project is ambitious that isn’t only hosting web applications but hosting the full stack to run python applications.
A first knee jerk reaction.., big f’in whoop. Its a HUGE limitation to support python stacks and not java, php, .NET, Ruby etc. PHP is the most widely used front end language for developing dynamic web apps on the planet.., you are missing out on a few developers if they cannot write for your platform.
Amazon allows you to custom build any stack (linux only) you want into their EC2 images and spin up machines at will. Google will most definitely add Java next.., I am very familiar with their love of Python/Java and disdain for PHP. Of course there will be no .NET support anytime in the very near future.., maybe when MS starts reselling Google Docs.
Another limitation.. which may, or may not be the case, is that a lot of the times developers want custom packages/modules. It is currently unclear if Google will allow developers to change their stack up on the fly themselves.
A plus that Google is trying to pitch is that they will be providing API’s that plug into their services for authentication, email, etc. Pretty much they are saying.., “Hey python Google fan boys.., if you ever wanted to create massively scalable web apps and dont want to worry about supporting them.., App Engine is just what your are looking for.”
Without knowing all the details yet one plus I do see for the Google service is that they will handle the autoscaling based on traffic loads. This is great because Amazon doesnt support this and relies on you to build your own auto scaling logic or go to one of their third party partners such as RightScale. Hopefully Amazon will just buy RightScale and build their tools directly into their platform.
So Google will mostly likely find some poster child apps/services to start touting within the next couple months. Become one of them by signing up…, it is supposedly limited to the first 10K developers, so head on over to get in line.