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Google isn't about search, Google is all about the infrastructure. From my perspective, Google's main competitive advantage has never really been their dominan

Google isn't about search, Google is all about the infrastructure. From my perspective, Google's main competitive advantage has never really been their dominance in search. I've always thought that their main innovations and their chief advantage has been in terms of their infrastructure. Arguably, Google has built the largest distributed computing cluster in the world with proprietary OS and datastore that is finely tuned to run on that cluster. They just don't advertise these facts too often. I'm sure that their dataset is easily in the petascale, and I'm sure that a lot of it is running in RAM to achieve the <400 millisecond response times they have. So, compare Google's infrastructure expertise to your $6 hosting account at Wally's Web Host, and I think that you start to see the difference. Wally might well sell you 15,000 Gb/month of web transfer, but they maybe might be overselling what they can actually provide. And, how many other web hosts offer to manage fault tolerant database replication for you? Heck, what's your instance up time at Wally's Web Host? Last I checked, Google's had 15 minutes of downtime since 2000. With GAE, I Google isn't selling web hosting. What they are doing is offering to outsource your sys admin duties for free. The verdict is still out, but I would be interested in seeing the response of apps on GAE to first couple of Slashdottings/Diggings/Boingboings. I'd venture a guess that they'll handle it rather smoothly, and that the developer running the site will be able to snooze through it, instead of panicking and trying to reboot the server, cache the page in question, or have Apache serve the page as a static file. Not having to panic each time your server pings your cell phone can only be a good thing for developers.

greendestiny 19y ago
App Engine isn't shared hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of 1 server. App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load.
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  "App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load." Theoretically. Right now, unless I'm reading things wrong, the limits imposed by the agreement are less than quite a small shared hosting account, and pretty much any dedicated or VPS account, could serve each month. Is n scalability really infinite, or even interesting, if it's less than a single box could serve using standard tools? I'm sure it'll expand in time, and maybe even in time to keep up with any app you build on it that happens to be explosively successful. I'm just saying that it's silly to imply that App Engine scales if you can't actually run bigger applications on it than a single traditional host.
  - greendestiny 19y ago
    I'm not saying it will scale well, but it is designed to scale in a way a shared host simply can't. If App Engine fails to scale because the bandwidth is too expensive then Google can reduce the price. I don't think the article even understands that this isn't simply another shared host. The joyent people didn't get it with their 'give the people root'.
tx 19y ago
Nobody argues the infrastructure part, he's saying that Google's Engine simply does not make much sense. Thing is, for 99.9% of all web applications do not have such crazy scalability requirements and open virtualized environments like EngineYard, Joyent, EC2, etc simply make more sense - they're open, they also take care of administration and hardware for you, but you're not supergluing yourself to Google's proprietary "WebOS".

greendestiny 19y ago

App Engine isn't shared hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of 1 server. App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load.

SwellJoe 19y ago
"App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load." Theoretically. Right now, unless I'm reading things wrong, the limits imposed by the agreement are less than quite a small shared hosting account, and pretty much any dedicated or VPS account, could serve each month. Is n scalability really infinite, or even interesting, if it's less than a single box could serve using standard tools? I'm sure it'll expand in time, and maybe even in time to keep up with any app you build on it that happens to be explosively successful. I'm just saying that it's silly to imply that App Engine scales if you can't actually run bigger applications on it than a single traditional host.
- greendestiny 19y ago
  I'm not saying it will scale well, but it is designed to scale in a way a shared host simply can't. If App Engine fails to scale because the bandwidth is too expensive then Google can reduce the price. I don't think the article even understands that this isn't simply another shared host. The joyent people didn't get it with their 'give the people root'.

tx 19y ago

Nobody argues the infrastructure part, he's saying that Google's Engine simply does not make much sense. Thing is, for 99.9% of all web applications do not have such crazy scalability requirements and open virtualized environments like EngineYard, Joyent, EC2, etc simply make more sense - they're open, they also take care of administration and hardware for you, but you're not supergluing yourself to Google's proprietary "WebOS".