Archive for the ‘Google Apps Engine’ tag
Google Apps Engine isn’t Amazon Web Services
For those of you who don’t know who Guido is, he’s the creator of Python and now works for Google. Recently he moved to the Google Apps Engine team. If you want a quick introduction to Google Apps Engine, just read this blog post and then watch the following two videos: (the first one shows creation of a sample application and the other one is Guido’s recap of Google Apps Engine):
Currently the Google Apps Engine is in a preview beta, and to the moment of writing this post, there’re no more inventions left. If you still want to experience the Google Apps Engine, you can download the SDK. Currently they support only Python, but they plan to support more languages as the product will mature. It really makes me curious to see what will be next language that they will support.
One important thing to understand is that Apps Engine isn’t Amazon Web Services. They both offer virtualization services, but in a different style:
Will it replace Amazon? It sure doesn’t look like it from where I sit. In fact, I don’t see this as much of a competitor to Amazon Web Services. There’s some overlap in some small area (hosted web apps on EC2), but I doubt that’s the bulk of Amazon’s business. As I said, we’ll likely end up using both (and other providers as they come along, too).
In my opinion, in current stage, Google Apps Engine is aimed at and more suitable for the most standard web applications. What’s not a standard web application? YouTube for instance – because it requires not only serving loads of pages (data), but also some computation (like converting video formats).
One things is sure – now that there’s competition to AWS, it will make things much more interesting.
Arik