Google App Engine - Changes Everything
I had the privilege last night of going to Google's Campfire One where the Google App Engine was launched, which is basically a service that I've been secretly hoping that Google would release for the past three years. App Engine is going to change everything -- as soon as they come up with a pricing model, anyway. I'm sure whatever it is will be more than competitive with Amazon's offerings, which isn't really worth any price given that they can't keep it fully operational. Yesterday was the perfect day for EC2 to fall over again, they might as well shut it off altogether once Google gets this service into production ;)
So why does Google App Engine change everything? I don't have a lot of time to spend here but a few key points:
- Single sign-on for Google users. Everyone with a gmail account is already registered for your service. You have no idea how cool this actually is :)
- BIGTABLE. My god. I would've spent in excess of $100k to have access to this part of Google's infrastructure and saved money. Scaling SQL databases sucks. If you have the kind of access patterns that we do, databases designed for OLTP are simply not suitable and it's a real pain to try and make it work. The fact that schema is managed directly in the code and that schema upgrades look awfully painless is a huge extra bonus.
- Works locally, deploys globally
- Python and WSGI!
- No more going to the data center, provisioning bandwidth from telcos, etc.
- Payment is surely coming. No more PayPal or Verisign or whatever.
In the same way that Google Apps (and Mac OS X) have enabled people to run without IT departments, Google App Engine is going to let them go big without an ops department. With the current imposed limits I can't prove this theory at Mochi Media, since everything we do is beyond the scale of their current quotas, but maybe I'll allocate some of my "infinite spare time" to ditch this Wordpress crap and try it out for my blog while they sort that out :)
The minus is that this project is actually probably pretty horrible for open source. Yahoo and the rest of the Hadoop team have their work cut out in making that stack competitive with this. If they don't, Google is going to own scale for a while. While MySQL and PostgreSQL still have some years left in them as people learn how to write scalable apps, I can't see that model lasting very long now that you don't have to be in Google's employ to use better solutions to the data problem.
Um, I guess you haven’t noticed the failures in some of Google’s services? Having used their APIs on development projects, they do have some issues with uptime. This is not to say this is not as good as or better than Amazon, but I would definitely not sit there and put Google up there as a paragon of uptime virtue.
It will be interesting. I definitely would not want to be a hosting company at the momment - my guess is most will be wiped out within the next 5 years as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, HP (yes, be prepared for some interesting anouncements from them) start offering these services and tremendous scale.
Comment by Alex — 2008-04-08 @ 6:24 am
I’m not sure where you got your information on EC2’s uptime but you appear to be misinformed. EC2 has had very respectable uptimes for individual instances and has not gone down as a complete service yet. There was that one error on their part that terminated a few instances, but that was operator (human) error and Google is just as likely to be subject to the same thing. Except, of course, with AppEngine’s model, no one but Google will know about it.
As well, has it occurred to you that there are many kinds of apps for which AppEngine is unsuited? E.g. anything that requires background processing is unsuited to AppEngine. Anything that requires asynchronous processing is unsuited to AppEngine. AppEngine is a pretty good service for what it is (which is essentially a Heroku clone), but lets not pretend it is the be-all-end-all just yet.
Comment by Toby DiPasquale — 2008-04-08 @ 7:12 am
if google owns your users, content and code, what do you own?
Comment by startup — 2008-04-08 @ 7:34 am
I’ve never had google fail on a non-beta service.
Of course, everything just stays beta forever, but at least I know what I’m getting.
Comment by Joey — 2008-04-08 @ 8:06 am
I’ve seen BlogSpot fail. I don’t see any beta markings on it anymore.
The beta ones are buggier. I’ve seen Google Finance go crazy. I’ve seen YouTube go screwy.
Of course Google has downtime.
Comment by Timothy — 2008-04-08 @ 10:59 am
Bob, if I’d seen your name there, I would have come and said hello! As it was I didn’t know anybody that I saw… I recognized a few company names but otherwise it was a lot of non-Python people :(
Comment by Titus Brown — 2008-04-08 @ 7:34 pm
I blogged about Widget Application Servers, whcih addresses some of the issues you raised
http://theabstracttruth.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/95/
Comment by bob — 2008-04-09 @ 7:40 am
I *really* don’t get all these digs at AWS when saying how great google app engine is going to be. Yes of course there is a subset of users for whom Google apps is going to be *way* better - no sys admin, high level services on tap etc. However - could I run any of the stuff I currently do in AWS on google apps? No. Does that mean there is something wrong with google apps? no - of course not - in fact it looks really cool and I’m looking forward to using it for things that are a good fit. I am also looking forward to all the other variations on hosted/grid/cloud/web platforms that others come up with. The days of “the network are the computer” - actually are here now (unlike when that was a sales tag) and how good they are….
Comment by mark — 2008-04-09 @ 8:56 am