Google App Engine
While having some sushi for lunch yesterday I was browsing the web and found out the first news about the new Google App Engine. Since they only give away 10,000 keys during the beta period I was lucky enough to snatch up one right after I finished my lunch.
It sounds like a great way explore the Google platform (ever wondered how GMail works?). I have worked my way through the examples and I will dream up a couple of things to build in the next few days.
Positive Points
- Free for up to 500MB of storage, 10Gb bandwith (per day), that is some serious bandwidth. My hosting provider charges me much more for much less. I wonder how quick they will amend the terms and condition to exclude hosting your own plain site (its easy if you don’t script too much) on their servers.
- This scales — I want to build another GMail then the Google data centers take care of that headache — at a cost of course
Negative Points
- At the moment the only language supported is Python. This is great if like me you don’t mind learning another language and build sites from scratch. It will be not so easy if you would like to port your existing PHP/Java site to the Google cloud.
- If you become too popular you are stuck. If you run the next StumbleUpon or Flickr then this environment will help you scale quickly without much effort. But at that point you can no longer move anywhere else as your application will only run on a Google system. You will need to pay them probably serious $$$ for the privilege. You might just want to consider selling to Google at this point, but they set the terms as you have nowhere else to go.
- And of course — do you trust Google with all your sensitive customer data? That is up to each individual company. For those companies who like the idea of scalable web server and storage idea without much hassle Google might just be willing to sell them a couple of pizza box servers to keep things in-house.
The Google App Engine cloud will probably take off regardless. What is needed now is some good & basic open source packages that allow you to quickly build a site and host it on a Google server. The architecture takes care of the scaling and will probably be priced reasonably for small and medium sized sites. So its great for having your own blog (think Blogger Advanced — with plug-ins) or web store.
Hosting providers might want to keep a an eye on things — and maybe build their own implementation of the Google API to “assist” moving the next internet star onto their servers.
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