Feh! v2

Google's Appengine - some initial thoughts

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:13:00 GMT

Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’. 

I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.

why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?

- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.

- Language choice. currently it only runs one language, python. They say they might support others in the future, but if not there will be a lot of people learning python (to the detriment of PHP, perl, and ruby), as well as new tools and utilities written in it. It’s going to give python a huge boost in usage

- Database choice. Google’s App Engine will be using ‘bigtable’ which is not a RDBMS, and uses a hacked up version of SQL. This impacts companies like mysql. you don’t need to worry about replication here Krow ;-)

- Applications are integrated into Google’s authentication system by default. you don’t even have your own list of users.

As a python developer I love it. It even has django out of the box, but I would be a bit cautious to base my startup on a infrastructure which can only be provided by a single company.. when I get a invite I will be porting my applications over to it.. hopefully by then someone would have ported their blogging software to it so i won’t have to.