Comments on: Google App Engine - Changes Everything

By: mark

mark — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:56:35 +0000

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….

By: bob

bob — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:40:18 +0000

I blogged about Widget Application Servers, whcih addresses some of the issues you raised

http://theabstracttruth.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/95/

By: Titus Brown

Titus Brown — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:34:11 +0000

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 :(

By: Timothy

Timothy — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:59:10 +0000

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.

By: Joey

Joey — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:06:13 +0000

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.

By: startup

startup — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:34:04 +0000

if google owns your users, content and code, what do you own?

By: Toby DiPasquale

Toby DiPasquale — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:12:08 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:24:22 +0000

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.