Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Google app engine - the next best things ?

Haven't got time to catch up with recent news, but so glad that I did eventually. 

In "recent" news, Google announced its new Google app engine.  It immediately sparked commotions not only in the Geek-world, but also in business world.  A great review of the new product can be found here

Long story short:
1. Google gets so proud of its extremely scalable infrastructure that it now offers us to have a piece of it. Basically, it provide you with a SDK, with which you can develop your next best, breakthrough, world-changing Web application.  Such SDK can be downloaded and installed at your local machine. You then develop and test your application locally, with the SDK simulating the Web server.

2. After testing, you decide (or have to) host your next best thing with Google. Good news though, the giant offers upto 5ooMb of web space for free. Your application will now behave exactly as it does in your local machine. Your mom, dad  and grandparents now can access it.

3. The beauty of this Google App Engine is that once you upload your application onto Google, your application has the same scalability as Google possesses at the moment. It means that millions Internet users (as if I've ever have more than 10 friends?) can access your application at once without wrongly cursing the Internet for being so slow. In addition, you can rest assure of all the Distributed Denial of Service to your application, had you ever made enemy with a hacker. For start-up or even already established companies that struggle with bringing their business only, it seems to come in just the right time. 

Sounds to good to be true ? The review I mentioned early pointed out brilliantly the hidden catches of this new product.
1. It's all about lock-in. Once you get addicted and have written all your applications with this, it may prove difficult to switch to another platform. Or look at it another way, you definitely have to re-write the "legacy" code (which is everything) of your current application if moving to Google's platform sounds ideal for you.
2. If this infrastructure does provide a fully featured back-ends (databases, etc...), which I suppose it does, the prominent question is  what will happen with your data. Google does not have the best reputation on it practice of gathering and handling private data. 
3. The long term effect of the lock-in strategy appears more worrying. Let see your application REALLY is the next best thing. You already relied on Google to make it extremely scalable. Moving away from it may not be the best move, as performance of your application won't get any better. And when Google comes to offer you a take-over deal, it almost definitely is the offer you can not refuse. Should you determine to sell your application for another party, such third parties may think twice with all the cost and effects when moving away from Google. 
4. This is probably not a catch, but I personally think that this product may encourage bad practices in developing scalable applications. Think of how many years of research effort has put on studying distributed system and how to make it scalable. Now with this, developers will not feel the need of designing a better, sustainable application.

My conclusion is that it is a great move by Google, probably Amazon's Cloud killer in my opinion. It illustrates vividly the current move towards a Software as a Service paradigm. Next best things really are just around the corner.

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