17 comments

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  Bob Warfield

  1 year ago

  Aaron has missed the point here. App Engine is actually much easier than Amazon Web Services. AWS is pure API's. If you wanted to run your app in Python, you'd have to figure out how to set it up on the raw virtual Linux machine. Google kicks things a level up and let's you start in a relatively easy scripting language. Once they add Ruby on Rails and PHP, that's an awful lot of the known universe.
  
  More on my blog:
  
  http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/earl...
  
  and:
  
  http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/well...
  
  Cheers,
  
  BW
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  Thanks for the comment, Bob.
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  Aaron Brazell

  1 year ago

  Thanks for the comment, Mat. My beef about privacy is second tier to my beef about selling the world a bill of goods on scalable infrastructure built on Google. It's the same bill of goods that Amazon sold the world with S3.
  
  Look, these service have their place. If you talk to the WordPress.com guys, arguably one of the most dynamic environments in existence, they will tell you that they use S3 for cold cache. That's about the extent of the benefit I think you'll see with GFS. Python is not trivial to learn, nor easy to use, but I'm betting there will be other libraries. However, that doesn't take the case in point out of the weakness in cloud computing. It is impossible, at this time, to have rich, and responsive apps built entirely on cloud. At b5, we have discovered what many others have also discovered - different environments require different optimizations. Serving images from a cold cache is one thing. They are binary and relatively static. Serving data rich dynamic scripting or data storage is a completely different ball of wax. On scale. and that's what they are touting.
  
  I'll give Google the benefit of the doubt for a bit. Maybe they can make it work. My guess is that they won't though.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  That's a good point, Aaron. Most of the applications I've read about
  that use S3 extensively, like SmugMug, use it primarily for limited
  image-serving. Not that many dynamic scripted apps or services I can
  think of.
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  Mark

  1 year ago

  I'd agree with it being classified as a knock-off for now, but I think the plan is definitely to compete in the future. Python is only temporary, and to dismiss the service based on language alone is a bit premature in my opinion. The interesting part will be what the next language they'll support is, and how soon that comes.
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  Aaron Brazell

  1 year ago

  Bob-
  
  Google said it was easy to use. Easy for whom? Python programmers? Great... it's easy to use.
  
  Chances are if you're a python programmer, you have your own environment. Why do you need GFS?
  
  This thing was marketed from the beginning of the announcement as being for people to have a low barrier to entry. It then progressed to low barrier of entry if you know what you're doing. Well, damn, does that really change the status quo?
  
  That's what I'm getting at. I didn't miss the point and in fact, I'm dead on if you want to approach this from the perspective of an entrepreneur and not a developer.
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  Vanessa Williams

  1 year ago

  Amazon is very far ahead, it'll take some effort to catch up and Python-only will slow their momentum down. So will the fully-integrated thing: all or nothing. Though it doesn't sound like a big deal I think this is a major differentiator between Amazon and Google's offerings. I still say Amazon gets it more than Google does. Independent services that can be composed is the right way to go. Google's just playing the lock-in game. (Or else their architecture isn't as good.)
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  I thought the same thing, Vanessa -- Google seems to be aiming much
  more at a lock-in type approach, whereas Amazon seems more open.
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  Vanessa Williams

  1 year ago

  One is playing the services game, the other is playing the application environment game. In other words, one is playing SOA and the other web hosting. In the enterprise, Amazon will rule over Google. In the Web 2.0 space... it will largely depend upon four things 1) marketing, 2) price, 3) reliability, 4) stage of growth of app--I believe at a certain size any app will outgrow a closed sandbox.
  
  On the other hand, if enough vocal Python developers get on board and like it, the buzz for GAE may become deafening.
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  Vanessa Williams

  1 year ago

  Sorry for replying to myself, but there ain't no trackbacks and I thought this summary might interest: http://www.fridgebuzz.com/2008/04/08/amazon-vs-...
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  Thanks for the link, Vanessa -- here's hoping Disqus launches support
  for trackbacks soon :-)
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  Mark

  1 year ago

  Comments by Leah Culver (of Pownce) to Robert Scoble after the announcement echo that statement - it's a valid argument.
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  foobar

  1 year ago

  You have to have some legitimate business concerns about growing your new application on Google, though. Service level guarantees? API lock-in with a potential competitor? I have written more about that here: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/4846
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  aaronwhite

  1 year ago

  My thoughts here: http://aaronwhite.tumblr.com/post/31133767
  
  Summary: It's exciting + slimy. It puts Amazon in an excellent place because whatever simplicity the Google stack achieves, can be executed on top of AWS, but the a-la carte, custom linux instances AWS provides is NOT possible on GAE.
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  Cam

  1 year ago

  All this hubbub about Python is unbelievable. Google simply used what they know, and knowing Python isn't a bad thing at all. Python is easy to learn. The language is compact and well considered, and compared to any of php, ruby or perl, it's remarkably readable. Is it always the right choice? Of course not.
  
  As for Aaron's comment that "for the growing number of non-technical entrepreneurs, python is neither easy to use and the demonstration does not demonstrate easy to scale", I don't think Google are aiming at non-technical entrepreneurs (actually, I'd love to see a non-technical entrepreneur create an EC2 AMI.), but rather a subset of applications (and developers) that interest Google. AWS redux this ain't.
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  Daniel Gibbons

  1 year ago

  I'd be interested in your take on the economics of both AWS and Google's offering. Someone whose opinion and knowledge I trust told me earlier this year that AWS was considered internally to be a nightmare, contributing a tiny fraction of Amazon's revenue yet representing a disproportionately large proportion of the company's infrastructure costs.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  There's no question that AWS has to be a fairly gigantic cost center
  at the moment, since Amazon said in its last quarterly report that the
  bandwidth it uses is greater than all the rest of the company's
  businesses put together -- and the revenue is lumped into a section
  that came to about $131-million, which is peanuts.
  
  I assume the business model for this and for Google's competing
  service is the old "hook 'em with free (or cheap) and hope they
  upgrade" model.
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