Google App Engine, Amazon AWS, the era of grid computing is dawning...

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:41:23 GMT

Google has just launched their App Engine service.

The service allows anyone to deploy python based apps onto google's grid computing infrastructure. The fact that it's a grid is transparent to users. So you don't have to worry about your application infrastructure and any related maintenance. If this sounds a bit like Amazon AWS, it is, sort of. Google App Engine is more a integrated service while AWS a set of isolated services. Amazon AWS gives programmers a set of highly scalable services that could be combined in use to build their applications. Google tries to provide the whole package so you don't have to worry about managing your operating system, but the storage capacity Google is providing is insufficient and lags far behind what Amazon is offering with S3.

It's too obvious that the two services could be combined to very quickly launch a highly scalable python based application on highly commoditised infrastructure for the very first time in history. If Google decides to support Ruby I am sure a lot of people from the Rails community would be very happy. Imagine running Rails on Google App Engine, using Amazon S3 for file storage, Amazon EC2 for batch processing, Amazon SQS for message based application. Zero custom infrastructure, zero maintenance, we should all be rejoicing!

Here's a video introducing how to make a quick message book and deploy it onto Google infrastructure. I couldn't get an account to play with yet, in the queue. Most interesting points from the video are
1. Object Oriented DB (at least it looks that way to me) - storage magically made available as soon as you define the object oriented Models in python
2. GQuery - looks like SQL to me but maps directly to the object oriented models

So would i use Google App Engine? For projects to play around with, my answer is absolutely. For relatively static websites, my answer would be yes again. For commercial applications, my answer is probably no at this point in time.

PS: see how much smugmug saved switching to Amazon S3 as their storage solution.

James Zhuo 卓宇翔: Technology

Google App Engine, Amazon AWS, the era of grid computing is dawning...