Google finally gets its head up in the (compute) clouds
Every one is talking about it and so I have to as well. After all, this blog is about observing the Internet. Google has finally launched their version the cloud computing infrastructure offering that Amazon has. It’s called the Google App Engine. It is dubbed to be a developer tool that allows you to build web applications that will run on the same infrastructure as Google’s own applications do – in two words, this should translate to scalability and availability.
However, having said that, it is to be seen how ‘available’ the platform actually remains. Amazon has been having a bad time with the uptime of their services. Ok, so what’s new and different about the Google App Engine:
First of all, unlike Amazon which has a series of loosely coupled services which developers can plug and play depending on their needs, Google’s is a complete package (which is good and bad):
- You get to use Google’s proprietary storage and file system: Bigtable and Google File System (GFS).
- You get to use App Engine’s APIs for sending email, etc.
- You get to use Google Account authentication.
- And you get to host the web application.
The biggest drawback at this stage is that the only development platform available right now is Python. Although Google says that they will be adding support for other languages in the future and the platform is supposed to be language agnostic; I doubt that we will be seeing .net applications running on App Engine anytime soon.
Of course like everything these days, this is a closed beta and only 10,000 developers will be given access initially (a limit which is already gone at the time of writing this article). There are limits on usage during the beta, which are pretty generous to begin with.
For more details from Google, visit the “What is Google App Engine” page.