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Google App Engine: CTOs should check it out

April 9, 2008 By

A friend at Google sent me a great clip from the Google Blog on the Google App Engine.  Let me quote below:

“We just launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure. In the same way that Blogger made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications.

With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable. Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow. This means they can spend less time dealing with system administration and maintenance, and more time building and improving their applications. (There’s more detail on the new App Engine Blog.)”

This is really exciting.

I don’t know if this will prove to be disruptive to the big enterprises the way that software on my disruptive technologies list  will be.  But this will be very big outside of enterprise firewalls and I would encourage all Chief Technology Officers to learn what they can about the Google App Engine for a couple reasons.  One reason is that the Google App Engine makes use of the Google File System (GFS), so it is a great way to learn how this scalable distributed file system works.  Another reason enterprise CTOs should check this out is it has a very easy to understand documentation set.  I like this model.  Whether you are taking advantage of a capability inside your firewall or outside your firewall, you need good documentation so your developers can rapidly come on line with the new capability.

Now, why do I think this will not be disruptive to the big enterprise?  In its current model, apps built by and run on the Google App Engine are Internet apps that are not designed to run on your hardware in your datacenter with your data.   I hope Google offers this capability to enterprises, perhaps as an appliance, or maybe just as middle ware you can put in your enterprise.  That would be cool.  Of course you would also need a means to implement GFS, but that could be done.

I’m playing with the SDK now.  I tried to sign up for a full account, but they have limited it to the first 10,000 developers who signed up during this beta period.  Hopefully I’ll be let in the club in the near term.

More later.

Bob

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  • http://www.jackbe.com Mark Milligan

    This sounds interesting. I'll check it out. Thanks for bringing it to my attention Bob. Google's infrastructure is impressive, and they will keep the cost-point low- kind of like the Wal-mart of data centers. Enterprises may be willing to take some risk outside their data center, if the cost benefits justify it.

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  • jitendrakavathekar

    Thanks for bringing this up Bob. We are going to talk about 50 large and medium enterprises over the next few weeks to do some market testing of some new products that we will be developing. In the early days of the this activity, SaaS based service is definitely a polarizing capability. They don't mind piloting on the SaaS, but eventually want it behind the firewall. These are companies such as HP, Intel, Sun (can I still call them SUN?). What's your take on the appropriateness of App Engine as a base for vendors selling into F50?

  • jitendrakavathekar

    Thanks for bringing this up Bob. We are going to talk about 50 large and medium enterprises over the next few weeks to do some market testing of some new products that we will be developing. In the early days of the this activity, SaaS based service is definitely a polarizing capability. They don't mind piloting on the SaaS, but eventually want it behind the firewall. These are companies such as HP, Intel, Sun (can I still call them SUN?). What's your take on the appropriateness of App Engine as a base for vendors selling into F50?

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for bringing this up Bob. We are going to talk about 50 large and medium enterprises over the next few weeks to do some market testing of some new products that we will be developing. In the early days of the this activity, SaaS based service is definitely a polarizing capability. They don’t mind piloting on the SaaS, but eventually want it behind the firewall. These are companies such as HP, Intel, Sun (can I still call them SUN?). What’s your take on the appropriateness of App Engine as a base for vendors selling into F50?

  • jitendrakavathekar

    Thanks for bringing this up Bob. We are going to talk about 50 large and medium enterprises over the next few weeks to do some market testing of some new products that we will be developing. In the early days of the this activity, SaaS based service is definitely a polarizing capability. They don’t mind piloting on the SaaS, but eventually want it behind the firewall. These are companies such as HP, Intel, Sun (can I still call them SUN?). What’s your take on the appropriateness of App Engine as a base for vendors selling into F50?