Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

mathewi — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:12:04 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Daniel Gibbons — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:39:54 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

mathewi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:38:02 -0000

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

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Vanessa Williams — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:19:43 -0000

Sorry for replying to myself, but there ain't no trackbacks and I thought this summary might interest: http://www.fridgebuzz.com/2...

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Mark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:18:47 -0000

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

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

aaronwhite — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:57:34 -0000

My thoughts here: http://aaronwhite.tumblr.co...

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

foobar — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:02:43 -0000

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/f...

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Vanessa Williams — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:58:55 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

mathewi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:20:03 -0000

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

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Vanessa Williams — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:36:24 -0000

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.)

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

mathewi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:37:02 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

mathewi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:35:02 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Bob.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Aaron Brazell — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:35:30 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Mark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:28:46 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Aaron Brazell — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:22:46 -0000

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.

Re: Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off?

Bob Warfield — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:22:30 -0000

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.