Spouting Shite

I dont see a reason to use Google’s new App Engine…yet

It had been predicted for over 12 months and eventually arrived last night. Google have released their reply to the Amazon AWS range of services. Google App Engine will allow developers to run their Web applications on the search giant’s computing cloud.

This new service is nowhere close to Amazon’s AWS offering though…Google have a long way to go before they can convince me of moving to this platform. Amazon’s web services (EC2, SimpleDB and S3) each perform a specific purpose (such as computing, data storage or database etc), and can be used together or separately as part of another project. Google App Engine on the other hand requires developers to host their apps there, process requests, and use their database (BigTable) with this single unified system that does the following:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

One big problem!…here is a requirement to use python….something that I have no experience using. I see this as a deal breaker as I am like quite a few developers….only familiar with a few of the popular languages like perl, PHP and Ruby. Perhaps they will eventually support other languages…but until then I am sticking with AWS.