What is the Google App Engine?

It is actually a bit different than I expected. I expected these services to directly compete with S3, EC2, SimpleDB and they do but as of right now you can only run Google App Engine apps on their servers. Amazon Web Services you can run on any server which makes for a much more flexible usage into existing apps. Not everything yet can be hosted in the cloud and having the access to store locally or in the cloud is key, right now Amazon has that right model for it. Amazon isn’t trying to be your authentication service or push you into other services, it is simply an extension of your domain. However Google’s offerings are very compelling here and threaten lots more markets than just amazon and salesforce but also hosting companies.

Google is looking like they are trying to take over the domain which might work but I am more for the parallel development. For instance, if you wanted to run storage on Google but computing on EC2 could you do that with Google’s setup, no. With Amazon you can swap out S3, EC2, SimpleDB for other things if you want. I like the componentized model much much better. Hopefully Google moves in the component model as well as their hosted solutions, this is very nice for upstart and getting things moving quickly though. Google does want to become the base.

On the other side, SalesForce is probably freaking out because if you use Google Apps for your business, this just adds in the element of business apps that can be run for entire small business infrastructure with Google Apps and any custom apps needed with Google App Engine. But they probably will adapt to use this within their systems, if it was more componentized and available outside Google App Engine.

I will post more on this when it has been through the wringer. As of right now Google’s service is extremely beta, limited on their servers and only available for small traffic. When they release pricing and more information we will see where the market falls for cloud based storage and computing.

A few things I really like about the new Google offerings is simplicity. They are using Python which arguably has some of the best toolkits out there for cloud development right now (boto being one of them for Amazon). They are pretty much using Pure Python and you can push up whatever libraries you want. They have Django and I will see if other templating engines like pyTenjin work up there. But also their configuration is in a simple format. Simple user formats I am fond of are Markdown and YAML. This is how you configure an app for Google App Engine, in YAML (Yet Another Markup Language):

application: myapp
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1
 
handlers:
- url: /
script: home.py
 
- url: /index.html
script: home.py
 
- url: /stylesheets
static_dir: stylesheets
 
- url: /(.*\.(gif|png|jpg))
static_files: static/\1
upload: static/(.*\.(gif|png|jpg))
 
- url: /admin/.*
script: admin.py
login: admin
 
- url: /.*
script: not_found.py

However I see Amazon still being the champ here when comparing the current publicly known offerings. Hopefully Google is just testing their engines and infrastructure in a limited capacity and will open it up to componentization to run from anywhere, much like OpenSocial or other services like RESTful, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC etc. As of right now Google App Engine is too closely coupled for integration into many systems residing on servers not on Google’s environment.

I think Google’s App Engine service more closely matches the SalesForce.com type hosted SaaS rather than true cloud technologies just yet. It is a bit of a mix of both.

It sure is an interesting time seeing and participating in another game changing announcement and new pardigm and bend in the software market from local to cloud computing and storage.

• App Gallery
• Google App Engine Docs
• Google App Engine

Google has some nice setup though with these great Python libraries running for your disposal:

In addition to the Python standard library and the App Engine libraries, the runtime environment includes the following third-party libraries:

• Django 0.96.1
• WebOb 0.9
• PyYAML 3.05

They are using django templates, these are pretty nice I have taken a liking to Mako and pyTenjin but django framework is quite nice.

Here is a video walk through of the application run through. Basic Python templating app essentially in django.

Google App Engine Walkthrough

Click here to view the embedded video.

Guido Speaks

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven’t been contacted by Google.

BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.

Techcrunch seems to think this will be released next week, with other services to follow up. This is the future, Amazon is well ahead but the power of Google is in the wings waiting. Also, Microsoft might show up with CloudDB or the next version of sql server having this capability. Service and pricing will determine the winner as cloud computing and storage is fairly new and very simple (usually the db is almost an active record like system where is it just flat tables and not alot of relational data).

The future of your software initiatives just might not need an entire infrastructure and IT management team…

The services and cloud web are changing software rapidly.