.Dust

As many blogs have already reported Google has just launched the App Engine project.

In a few words, Google App Engine will let you build a full stack and auto­mat­i­cally scal­able web appli­ca­tion hosted on their premises.

This is what Google is say­ing about the project:

Today we’re announc­ing a pre­view release of Google App Engine, an application-​hosting tool that devel­op­ers can use to build scal­able web apps on top of Google’s infra­struc­ture. The goal is to make it eas­ier for web devel­op­ers to build and scale appli­ca­tions, instead of focus­ing on sys­tem admin­is­tra­tion and maintenance

Lever­ag­ing Google App Engine, devel­op­ers can

* Write code once and deploy. Pro­vi­sion­ing and con­fig­ur­ing mul­ti­ple machines for web serv­ing and data stor­age can be expen­sive and time con­sum­ing. Google App Engine makes it eas­ier to deploy web appli­ca­tions by dynam­i­cally pro­vid­ing com­put­ing resources as they are needed. Devel­op­ers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.

* Absorb spikes in traf­fic. When a web app surges in pop­u­lar­ity, the sud­den increase in traf­fic can be over­whelm­ing for appli­ca­tions of all sizes, from star­tups to large com­pa­nies that find them­selves rearchi­tect­ing their data­bases and entire sys­tems sev­eral times a year. With auto­matic repli­ca­tion and load bal­anc­ing, Google App Engine makes it eas­ier to scale from one user to one mil­lion by tak­ing advan­tage of Bigtable and other com­po­nents of Google’s scal­able infrastructure.

* Eas­ily inte­grate with other Google ser­vices. It’s unnec­es­sary and inef­fi­cient for devel­op­ers to write com­po­nents like authen­ti­ca­tion and e-​mail from scratch for each new appli­ca­tion. Devel­op­ers using Google App Engine can make use of built-​in com­po­nents and Google’s broader library of APIs that pro­vide plug-​and-​play func­tion­al­ity for sim­ple but impor­tant features.

This is def­i­nitely com­pet­ing with Ama­zon S3, EC2 and Sim­pleDB suite of oser­vices and it is nice to see this happening.

There are some other inter­est­ing things that need to be noticed

If I were a startup I would def­i­nitely con­sider some­thing like Ama­zon S3 or Google App Engine for my infra­struc­ture. It will allow me to focus all of my efforts on the design of my product/​service with­out hav­ing to con­sider any scal­a­bil­ity issue. More­over I can invest the money i will save in mar­ket­ing and sales instead of bring­ing a bunch of servers in a dat­a­cen­ter. You will also spare money on the sup­port of those machines

In some way this is a sort of tech­nol­ogy democ­ra­ti­za­tion. Tal­ent and cre­ativ­ity may count more than money

The other pos­i­tive thing is that you will be already sit­ting in a Google envi­ron­ment and that will make eas­ier for your com­pany to be acquired by Google itself. At the end of the day isn’t that the dream of any­one of us

On the dark side there are a cou­ple of things that need to be considered.

You will not have con­trol over the infra­struc­ture your ser­vice will rely on. The recent Ama­zon S3 black out is some­thing that may hap­pen and may turn to be not so easy to sort out

The other thing is that is may be not so easy to take out your appli­ca­tion from Google App Engine and run it on your own server. If, for any rea­son, you may think that this will hap­pen you need to take this in account.

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4. Google, It’s A Plat­form Not A Mobile Phone
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