I think the idea was that Google should provide everyone with 250K servers, dark fiber, and a pony, for free, forever; when it turned out there were some restrictions, all the jilted idealists immediately went ballistic.
Agreed. I think that the perception is that Google's biz model is less than transparent to the uninitiated consumer who doesn't understand what, exactly they are giving up in exchange for any one of hundreds of free services on the internet (eyeballs to advertiser, privacy) It's for the good of these huddled masses that the mavens breathlessly shuttle the news to the masses. "It's people! Google makes money by delivering people!"
Most the people complaining are disatisfied because they want access to the service without the lock-in of the platform. They're the internet equivalent of a warning on the nut covered M&Ms package that says "Warning, contains nuts."
They won't be satisfied until the service contains no chocolate covered lock-in.
Well, from my perspective (and after using EC2 to great effect) I was just a bit disappointed that Google went down this route. Its not that its 'bad' but that its not as good as I was expecting. Everyone expects great things from Google so its difficult for them to impress now
Companies have been saying "write for our platform, it's all good, we won't screw you over in the future, honest" for years. Sometimes it's true.
I'm not sure what they're "up front" about. What have they said, exactly? The most prominent thing I see is "preview", and I have no idea if that's supposed to sound more or less permanent than their typical subtitle, "beta".
I think what concerns people is the combination of (a) it's a very different platform than just about anything else, so you have to really commit, and (b) there's no guarantee, no roadmap, no nothing. Oh, and (c) Google will keep track of your users for you (how nice of them!).
It looks like a hiring tool. They like to buy companies with hot products, which is a good way to get hot programmers, but these programmers didn't (and couldn't) know the unique Google infrastructure. This is the logical solution to that.
On a personal note, I go have a beer with my friends at Amazon and they tell me "such-and-such a service will definitely be around for at least another year, and probably much longer, and we're planning X and Y and Z for it". But on the rare occasions my friends at Google hang out with me, they barely even tell me what project they're on; everything is ultra-secret. The whole corporate culture makes me suspicious.
"But on the rare occasions my friends at Google hang out with me, they barely even tell me what project they're on; everything is ultra-secret. The whole corporate culture makes me suspicious."
I wonder how google inculcates this culture in its developers? Serious question.
Most developers I know are more like the amazon devs than the google ones. Not that they blab about what they are doing to all and sundry, but most of my friends don't have any problems talking about what they are doing.
Interestingly enough I haven't encountered this "secrecy" in my friends who work at Google Bangalore. I guess Indians are a more garrulous people! (or my friends really trust me).
Actually because Google is an OpenId provider, I believe with just a bit of work you can export the application out of the GAE by adding support for OpenId
Tims right and he's wrong at the same time. What google has done is quite interesting. By commoditising the application server software, & reducing the cost, it means more Startups can quickly move to the market. There is nothing (yet) that I can see that will stop you moving your code & site if you have to later on. A big cost in time & money is setting up your own servers. You can do self hosting but do you have to if it is a time/complexity cost?
The only people who are really squealing are the hardware/software vendors (Tim works for Sun) and ISP's who have effectively taken a pay cut.
> The only people who are really squealing are the hardware/software vendors (Tim works for Sun) and ISP's who have effectively taken a pay cut.
That's not my impression. I've seen some concern from service consumers, as well. When you buy service from AWS or conventional hosting providers, the costs are out in the open, and you are paying as you go and free to switch to something else.
With Google, all the costs are hidden or down the road, which is especially scary given the lock-in. Does their service get too expensive when you scale? Don't like Google having full access to your account and traffic data? Need to extend your application with features Google's platform can't provide? Well, you'll need to rewrite the back end of you application. And ask all your users to re-register, since you can't exactly take Google's accounts with you.
Yes, in theory, you can move your site later on. In practice, good luck with that. Personally, I wouldn't touch this service for anything.
"... With Google, all the costs are hidden or down the road, which is especially scary given the lock-in ..."
I'm not going to start advocating this google model is good for everyone. If fact I'm pretty sceptical of google ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/google/page2/ but I found this particular tool good enough, now for me. For example. If I want to get a site up and running with django, python 2.5, a scalable db, with a domain name with an isp right now, I'm pretty sure I'd either a) have to host my own, $$$... (cost of pc, cable, time with admin) or b)
get some rack space at an ISP that has a later version of python (if I use CGI) and django again $$$, $$$. Now looking at the tools available I'm pretty sure you could get users to register their details with your application & keep the data & export it later. I haven't read the license details about this. (there's one problem, checking for and asking for permission) As for the tools I'm pretty sure you could re-create the db access on another system.
What I do say to myself is, "could I prototype an idea here" then investigate moving if I move to the next level that may incur hidden costs.
"... Need to extend your application with features Google's platform can't provide? Well, you'll need to rewrite the back end of you application. And ask all your users to re-register ..."
I think you can solve the later problem as suggested above. As for the first. Well there seems at the moment things you cannot do with this platform. Computationally extensive applications that use 'C' based code. It appears what google is offering is the front-end tools that scale. Not the back-end computational processing.
"... The only people who are really squealing are the hardware/software vendors ..."
Tim O'Reilly argues this maybe a lock-in play ~ http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/is-google-app-engi... Until I read the license to verify you have access to your data I'm less worried about this than google fighting the Internet. I think we are going to see more "level 3 platforms" which have ' runtime Environments' ~ http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-three-kinds.html so they are not going to go away. Trying them out might allow you to see a problem to work on exploiting insight you have gained.
Some reasonable points, especially if you're already committed to Django as a platform.
BTW, I meant back end as in data store, not computation. From what I understand, using BigTable differs markedly from using MySQL or Postgres, and you would have to port to one or the other to leave Google unless you want to do some serious development work on your data back end.
I hope you're right about being able to salvage your user data, but I would study both the license agreement and the technical capabilities very closely on this one. It would be a shame to build an early site thinking it was just a starting point and then discover that you could never change key aspects of it.
"... Some reasonable points, especially if you're already committed to Django as a platform. .."
Not really. There are some aspects of Django that really suck. Complex template logic for one . I really appreciated the simplicity of webpy after wading through the django api. On a side note, friendfeed's (Bret Taylor) ~ http://bret.appspot.com/entry/experimenting-google-app-engin... worked on google appengine. When he built friendfeed he chose webpy as a starting point. There is a lesson somewhere in there. They key thing is I can use CGI, webpy or django so I'm not bound to any one choice.
"... I hope you're right about being able to salvage your user data, but I would study both the license agreement and the technical capabilities very closely on this one. It would be a shame to build an early site thinking it was just a starting point and then discover that you could never change key aspects of it. ..."
Good points I'll have to think about them. The one that will matter most will be the user information. The app I have in mind is a design tool of sorts that generates object code for users. I don't think appengine as it is will work for the back-end ideas I have but who knows if users really want this?
Google has been very up front with what it expects and what it will provide; I don't think there has been any shadiness on their part.