Joseph Scott’s Blog

Today’s big news was the announcement of Google App Engine. Plenty of people have been covering the details, I just wanted to leave a few thoughts:

This looks like an amazing service. Being able to make use of Google infrastructure for your web app is a wonderful idea. Currently limited to Python, so all the Python fans are going nuts.

What Google App Engine (GAE) isn’t is a direct competitor to Amazon’s web services (EC2, S3, etc). What Amazon provides are virtualized services, what GAE provides is a specific platform. While that platform is pretty amazing, it is also complete and total vendor lock in. If you needed to move your application off of GAE, how would you do it? This might give pause to those interested in buying your startup.

There’s an SDK for starting your app before going live, but no way to migrate data from your test system to the live server. I imagine as people begin to use this new platform they’ll find other issues as well. That isn’t to say that GAE isn’t worth while, just that it isn’t a miracle cure.

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I’m starting to wonder if someone over at Amazon really does have a master plan to take over the world. Today they announced the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). EC2 allows you to have a “virtual computer” hosted at Amazon which is roughly equivalent to a “1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth”. Pricing $0.10/hour, $0.20/GB of Internet traffic and $0.15/GB/month of S3 storage used. Running a system 24×7 would set you back $72/month plus S3 storage costs.

The folks who thought S3 wouldn’t change things, may start changing mind now. Amazon has a ton of information up on this new service: Developer Tools, WDSL, Forum, FAQ and a Getting started guide.

Right now they only support Linux based systems, but hopefully we’ll see that expand. I’m voting for FreeBSD support! Amazon is using XEN to virtualize these systems, so hoping for FreeBSD support seems reasonable.

I’m on the waiting list for next beta round, I look forward to trying this out. Expect to hear more about this.