App Engine, a good service but could do better to aid interoperability
December 17, 2008 – 10:32 am
In its current guise, I am not a big fan of Google App Engine…even the new leader of the Western World couldn’t convince me of the virtues.
In my September post I wrote about why I don’t like the existing service. I was a little critical of the service but I think I have justification, while this is still an early BETA service I am unhappy with the way the service is being positioned.
It’s a pain in the neck for App Engine to only support python (apparently PHP et al will follow soon) and limiting external URL requests to 4 seconds is a little draconian, lets forget the fact that you have to use the Gmail mail delivery service and that there is no SQL database available. While all of these are rather limiting they are not the real reason why I don’t like App Engine….it’s because of vendor lock in and the lack of any interoperability with other cloud providers. Google is a big company who will probably dominate this market…they can afford to do better in this area, but they seem to choose not to…Is Google evil?
That doesn’t mean that I am not interested in how App Engine is developing. The service has some incredible advantages over the AWS model if you run a website. Using App Engine you would simply upload your web files and let the system scale for you as opposed to AWS EC2 customers would need to launch multiple servers and install all sorts of stuff. Obviously, if you need more than simply web hosting then the service is somewhat lacking (no ability to schedule jobs, email delivery is a problem and file access is limited).
The App Engine Blog has released a post which details the following:
- an App Engine System Status Site that monitors the latency and uptime of various components and provides real-time visibility into their performance
- a new Quota Details Dashboard, detailing all of the resource quotas that affect your application
- a sneak peak at our upcoming billing feature, which will enable your app to grow beyond our free quotas!
I will watch with interest, but it is a shame that Google is not doing all it can to progress the virtues of interoperability and perhaps the open source software movement.
