After Amazon, Google App Engine is the next big contender for mainstream cloud computing. The power of Google’s infrastructure will spin up as many instances of your app as needed, and they’ve provided a simple Python framework with Django templates for development, with additional languages to come. Basic accounts will always be free, and after the current preview ends, a la carte pricing wil be similar to Amazon’s services.
Joe Gregorio was the only one to write live code in a session - “the one thing more foolish than relying on a live demo”, he said. A simple to do list application went together simply on his local machine, and would be deployable with a single additional command. As a fan of test-driven development, I did ask about unit testing; GAUnit and Selenium were recommended.
Google also provides an SDK for the engine, meaning anyone is free to write their own compatible server and avoid vendor lock in - a concern voiced by several people during other discussions. A few other interesting bits:
- Uploads to code.google.com are replicated 3 times at 4 data centers, for a total of 12 redundant copies - now that’s a backup system!
- Google has released over 100 pieces of their infrastructure as open source, which is truly awesome. And as their stock price shows, you can be both charitable and profitable.
They also had some fun stickers (above).
