Build new applications in the cloud - or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.

It appears so far that it is pretty Microsoft centric for tool support.  Of course the software and servers will be Windows.  This week and last, Microsoft platforms have made their way into the cloud platforms at Amazon and now Microsoft.  Google also recently announced the support of Java.  Another set of aquisitions at Rackspace in the buying of Slicehost and JungleDisk also seem to show the space heating up and the companies all believing in the cloud platform emergence and evolution that seems to be happening.

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta

Amazon also launches with windows support, SQL Server support and much more.  This is great news in times where budgets are tight and people want to start scalable businesses but want to only pay for what is used.  The cloud layer will be a very attractive option to many.

Learn more about the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. There are already lots of great simple toos like ElasticFox (Firefox EC2 Extension) to help manage your AMIs from a browser.  You can start and stop armies of configured servers from a little extension in your browser.

Developers are getting many tools to build great things.  We hope more products are out of beta soon like AppEngine.

Microsoft also has been playing with entering the cloud with Mesh and now with “Strata”.  This would be a cloud for .NET developers.

There are already cloud providers for .NET mainly in Mosso’s offerings of any language being cloud enabled. But one from Microsoft will probably draw all the .NET developers to it like most Microsoft offerings.

Also, Amazon EC2 recently announced support for MS SQL Server and Windows servers.  So really any platform can also be used in Amazon EC2 in Amazon Machine Images. This took longer to happen due to the licensing per processor and server that most Microsoft software has.

This won’t be changing things much for me in the near term but having more platforms available in the cloud and on cloud systems is the natural progression.  At some point a platform might have advantages in cheaper processing but for now Python with AppEngine is still the best bet.

Next question is, when are they going to launch this out of beta?  I want to start using it for business.

We’re happy to announce we’ve released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:

• More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
• Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
• Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application’s logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py –help for more information on how to download your logs.
• Send email as logged in user: If you’re using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.

Be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. Have more changes you’d like to see with App Engine? Let us know in our Google Group!

CloudFS is new, untested but a bit cheaper than Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is where mainly ‘buckets’ of data of any content type can be stored and retrieved by a unique key across all resources. This is useful for image, content and media hosting and charges by the GB usually less than .15 cents per GB.

About CloudFS

It looks like this, it is built in XUL but could easily be built in AJAX or Flash or even Silverlight using APIs.

Figure 1: Shows the AMIs and your installed AMI instances.

Figure 2: Shows Available Preconfigured instances from Amazon and Others

Pretty nice little GUI to the EC2 service to help people ease into setting up and playing with cloud computing. For people running on the cloud already this is nice to have a quick web developer tool for testing, and quickly changing the dynamics of your resources with in your browser.

I think the cloud will be victorious sooner rather than later if there are great tools to beat out traditional hosting. Finally making tools that aren’t locked to a hosting company with bad applications. At least it makes this area more competitive.

This is what makes Amazon’s model so attractive. Even though it is pieces and components, services will be built on it with great interfaces, probably much better ones than can be designed by the cloud provider themselves via great apis and componentization of cloud infrastructure.

• Download ElasticFox
• Amazon post about ElasticFox

The service or system built on another term called Horizon is their competitor to Amazon’s AWS platform and Google App Engine as well as many other emerging companies and platforms offering scalable cloud based services.

From the looks of the schematics and diagrams it appears closer to a Google App Engine hosted service rather than a componentized Amazon model.

If you are a developer and not excited about the ability to make applications with no worry of scale or support in infrastructure, I am just not sure if you are a developer or more worried about change. I always have these ideas that end up being based on the fast that I would need at least 3-5 servers to pull off. Unfortunately when you are smaller or just trying out an idea you dont’ want to buy infrastructure for the most extreme case (large traffic spike) and then have servers sitting at 1% utilization the rest of the time. With cloud computing and service storage, this whole problem is abstracted away. Many times this is at a much reduced cost, you are only paying for minimal usage, not what your maximum usage would be.

One big element to the cloud computing rage is also that dynamic languages will win out. If you will note in all the new cloud technologies there is a recurring theme of BigTable/MapReduce datastores (eliminiating much of relational database ways), dynamic languages (removing static typing and adding flexibility for rapid deployment and development) and the developer has alot of freedom and power to innovate.

Consider cloud computing the point at which dynamic languages such as Python (maybe Jython, IronPython, etc), Ruby, and higher order parallel languages like Erlang won out. Google App Engine uses Python, SimpleDB from Amazon is built with Erlang, etc. These languages like Python and Ruby which are slower (Ruby is much much slower than Python, Python can hang with static compiled languages) but the scalability, ActiveRecord like BigTable architecture, and rapid prototyping ORMs which were previously seen as too performance intensive or slow could become moot with the power of Amazon or Google’s infrastructure.

It is just a real interesting time in technology, it a major leap, it should be recognized. If you are a developer or infrastructure specialist, you should be diving in.

The only companies in it now are Amazon and Google is emerging. There are also some competitors like Joyent.  But I imagine there will be many companies propping up that are using Amazon or Google or other clous services as their core product.

Amazon is still far far ahead in offering componentized pieces of architecture such as S3, EC2, SQS etc.

To create a model:

class Person(db.Model):
  first_name = db.StringProperty()
  last_name = db.StringProperty()
  hobbies = db.StringListProperty()
 
p = Person(first_name="Albert", last_name="Johnson")
p.hobbies = ["chess", "travel"]
 
p.put() # creates/updates model and inserts data

To create an Expando model
Expando models are fun because they are dynamic. You can add properties to the classes on the fly and it expands automatically.

class Person(db.Expando):
  first_name = db.StringProperty()
  last_name = db.StringProperty()
  hobbies = db.StringListProperty()
 
p = Person(first_name="Albert", last_name="Johnson")
p.hobbies = ["chess", "travel"]
 
p.chess_elo_rating = 1350
 
p.travel_countries_visited = ["Spain", "Italy", "USA", "Brazil"]
p.travel_trip_count = 13
 
p.put() # creates/updates model and inserts data

Prototyping is extremely fast with Google App Engine. Python of course is always extremely fun to do. The winds are a changin’.

[ google app engine entities docs for the DatastoreAPI ]