Google App Engine becoming much more like Windows Azure?
The latest Google App Engine 1.5 release announcement has some puzzling edges. For once, it seems that Google is making its public cloud evolves to become much more alike another public cloud, namely Windows Azure.
Google App Engine (GAE) was PAAS (Platform as a Service) right from the beginning, much like Windows Azure. Although, GAE had this very distinctive edge where apps were charged against strict CPU usage whereas most other public clouds charge per instance aka per allocated Virtual Machine. With the latest announcement, it’s clear that GAE is transitionning toward a much finer control on VMs, which bring GAE very close to Azure as far client app architecture is concerned.
Then, GAE features the Go programming language and runtime which looks to me like an attempt to get the best of both Java and Python, while giving Google a lot of freedom to push its own innovations. Indeed, Java is controlled by Oracle while Python is controlled by its own foundation. Nothing wrong here, except that Google can’t make those languages and runtimes evolve to better fit its cloud platform. It’s noticeable that Microsoft initiated such a change nearly a decade ago with C#, as an effort, at the time, to combine the best of Java and C++. The evolution of GAE as a Go-friendly PAAS would make it extremely similar to Azure in its C#-friendly ways.
If GAE trully follows the Azure path, here are a few items that we can expect from GAE in the future:
- Native IDE (Integrated Development Environmnent) fo Go ala Visual Studio.
- SQL as a Service (probably some MySQL variant) ala SQL Azure.
- Caching as a Service ala AppFabric Caching.
Wait and see.
Reader Comments (1)
Interesting article. I think you nailed the possible future features correctly. For me as an app developer, it was the SQL that made me choose Azure.
May 11, 2011 | mortjac