8 ms·

Open Source Google App Engine Clone

187 points by frankhamlin 13y ago

niggatitus 13y ago
Does anyone have any experience with this project?
- frankhamlin 13y ago
  I tried it out on VirtualBox for some GAE apps I have. It was pretty easy to get going and the apps ran perfectly.
ShaneCurran_ 13y ago
It's sponsored by Google (check the footer of README.md)
- nikcub 13y ago
  They need something to assure enterprise customers hosting with them (especially as Google are trigger happy with killing products). A lot of companies with enterprise clients will place their code into escrow, supporting an open alternative is better.
SEJeff 13y ago
Could this be due to GAE not getting as much traction as google had hoped?
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Probably not, AppScale has been around for years now. GAE's main customer is Google itself as far as I know, so I don't think they have any problems with traction. They certainty aren't priced or have the features necessary to get much traction outside Google at any rate. They're a premium service with very harsh restrictions and poor portability. I gave them a try for awhile, but ultimately they have too many drawbacks and have been plagued with terrible issues such as 20sec+ start up times on GAE/Java. It's just not a great option considering you can get the same performance as ~50 GAE instances with a single dedicated host at 2-4 order of magnitude less cost. AppScale itself is pretty interesting though, but without the Google Bigtable backend, most of the forced restrictions don't make much sense and actually decrease performance and reliability compared to just developing for a linux VM directly.
  - unz 13y ago
    Not to get argumentative, but I often come across people trashing app engine and I just don't get it. I think it's absolutely great and how software development should be done, They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it can't be used. And it's about as cheap as you could make something like that, If google itself finds it valuable, that's a argument in favor, not against, google having some of the best software developers around. The only limitation currently is it doesn't have postgresql. (I don't have anything to do with google. I just wish more people used it so more features could be added, and more open source software written for it, and I'd benefit from that).
    - sazpaz 13y ago
      I think it's absolutely great and how software development should be done, They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it can't be used. Curious about your argument here. Care to explain?
      - unz 13y ago
        Let's say you're a college student or career changer who just learned python. You can write a script, upload it, and have the world use it for free. You then learn sql and build complex apps. Learn about bigtable and build a viral app that scales to anything. Learn golang and make your python code more efficient. And you can do this all free to start off with. The alternative - learn linux, web servers, db admin, security. Or php/mysql and pay shady hosters $20 a month and buy domain name. If you're experienced and know all about servers etc, you can now ditch all that knowledge and outsource it to someone else and focus on higher value things.
        rbanffy 13y ago
        It also encourages you to write scalable applications - no in-request long operations, queues, eventual consistency, no filesystem access dependencies, planning for failure on every level etc. Using App Engine is a course on best practices in web development.
- nlake44 13y ago
  Their traction numbers seem pretty impressive with over 3 million active applications, which they announced at Google IO of this year. Last year, iirc, it was around 1 million apps.
- timothya 13y ago
  I wouldn't exactly say that AppEngine doesn't have much traction. Every month, half the world's IP addresses touch some service hosted on AppEngine[1], which is a pretty huge number. [1]: And that statistic is more than a year old now (from 2012's Google I/O: http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/google-app-engine-by-the-numbers/ http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/google-app-engine-by-the-number...), it's a higher number now.
- valhallarecords 13y ago
  SnapChat uses App Engine: http://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-building-on-google-compute-engine/ http://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-build... So does Khan Academy. Ben Kamens, their lead developers, writes a lot of great App Engine tips on his blog: http://bjk5.com/post/54202245691/the-app-engine-way http://bjk5.com/post/54202245691/the-app-engine-way
martin_ 13y ago
Any plans to support PHP? It seems to be the only missing engine before being a complete clone https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/
- nlake44 13y ago
  Author of AppScale here. We have php support on our road map. I suspect its about one to two sprints out.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    I submitted a presentation proposal about AppScale for this year's PythonBrasil (no word yet on whether it was approved). Is there anything in special I should highlight?
    - nlake44 13y ago
      Drop me an email at raj@appscale.com and we can discuss all the recent features we've added. One service we're able to provide because of AppScale's API is disaster recovery for GAE applications. We presented it recently at Gigaom's Structure conference: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130620-908833.html http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130620-908833.html
jagan123 13y ago
Appengine is already cheap and reliable. Why would anyone want it on other cloud providers?
- nlake44 13y ago
  I agree. The private case may be more appealing though. App developers might have some enterprise customers who want to run their applications behind a firewall.
- sktrdie 13y ago
  Because if they increase their prices, as they have done in the past already, you may still want the freedom of hosting your app somewhere else.
  - bitbitbit 13y ago
    Misleading statement. They did not "increase" the price so to speak. The platform came out of beta and into normal pricing mode. The low prices were introductory prices to get developers to use the platform.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - nnnnni 13y ago
      The price is higher than it was before, correct? In that case, it was increased.
      - bitbitbit 13y ago
        Increased back to the original price. Yes. It was not higher than the original price and the prices have gone down a little since. Nice play on words there. :)
    - pekk 13y ago
      You are playing with words. The price of using the service increased dramatically.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
moondowner 13y ago
Nice! A complete clone of GAE is really handy to be able to use in some cases. Note that you can also run Java GAE apps on JBoss AS or OpenShift with CapeDwarf: https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf
jwheeler79 13y ago
AppScale are notorious for spamming the official GAE mailing list, and for that reason alone, I'd be cautious dealing with them
- rbanffy 13y ago
  I'm looking at the google-appengine group and there are three messages with the word "appscale" in them since June. Am I looking into the wrong list?
drivebyacct2 13y ago
There's this as well, for those of you with showdead http://www.appscale.com/ http://www.appscale.com/
newtexan 13y ago
I've been working on porting an existing python based AE project to AS and so far so good. My companies' reasoning for putting time and resources into AppScale is for redundancy. AE is a great platform to develop for however it's not a 5 9s platform that's for sure.
jaytaylor 13y ago
This looks very similar to the ShipBuilder PaaS written in Go (https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder). I am excited to see all these open source PaaS systems beginning to emerge and mature. These all help to foster and sustain an environment which makes creating and hosting large-scale applications easier for developers. A considerable and big win in the OSS world if you ask me!
richardw 13y ago
I'd love a no-fidget version of GAE, where the underlying infrastructure wasn't 'upgraded' constantly, or at least was done on a very careful schedule. A good portion of issue mails from Google are 'we upgraded something and broke these things. btw, we care about reliability.' A project like this might encourage a hosting company to take that on. One disadvantage with Google is that your app can be affected by very many layers of goodness, including leaky abstractions that have nothing to do with GAE on the surface. Like when they blocked some Cloudflare somewhere down the stack and various Google sites were affected, including GAE and Blogger.

187 points by frankhamlin 13y ago

niggatitus 13y ago

Does anyone have any experience with this project?

frankhamlin 13y ago
I tried it out on VirtualBox for some GAE apps I have. It was pretty easy to get going and the apps ran perfectly.

ShaneCurran_ 13y ago

It's sponsored by Google (check the footer of README.md)

nikcub 13y ago
They need something to assure enterprise customers hosting with them (especially as Google are trigger happy with killing products). A lot of companies with enterprise clients will place their code into escrow, supporting an open alternative is better.

SEJeff 13y ago

Could this be due to GAE not getting as much traction as google had hoped?

RyanZAG 13y ago
Probably not, AppScale has been around for years now. GAE's main customer is Google itself as far as I know, so I don't think they have any problems with traction. They certainty aren't priced or have the features necessary to get much traction outside Google at any rate. They're a premium service with very harsh restrictions and poor portability. I gave them a try for awhile, but ultimately they have too many drawbacks and have been plagued with terrible issues such as 20sec+ start up times on GAE/Java. It's just not a great option considering you can get the same performance as ~50 GAE instances with a single dedicated host at 2-4 order of magnitude less cost. AppScale itself is pretty interesting though, but without the Google Bigtable backend, most of the forced restrictions don't make much sense and actually decrease performance and reliability compared to just developing for a linux VM directly.
- unz 13y ago
  Not to get argumentative, but I often come across people trashing app engine and I just don't get it. I think it's absolutely great and how software development should be done, They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it can't be used. And it's about as cheap as you could make something like that, If google itself finds it valuable, that's a argument in favor, not against, google having some of the best software developers around. The only limitation currently is it doesn't have postgresql. (I don't have anything to do with google. I just wish more people used it so more features could be added, and more open source software written for it, and I'd benefit from that).
  - sazpaz 13y ago
    I think it's absolutely great and how software development should be done, They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it can't be used. Curious about your argument here. Care to explain?
    - unz 13y ago
      Let's say you're a college student or career changer who just learned python. You can write a script, upload it, and have the world use it for free. You then learn sql and build complex apps. Learn about bigtable and build a viral app that scales to anything. Learn golang and make your python code more efficient. And you can do this all free to start off with. The alternative - learn linux, web servers, db admin, security. Or php/mysql and pay shady hosters $20 a month and buy domain name. If you're experienced and know all about servers etc, you can now ditch all that knowledge and outsource it to someone else and focus on higher value things.
      - rbanffy 13y ago
        It also encourages you to write scalable applications - no in-request long operations, queues, eventual consistency, no filesystem access dependencies, planning for failure on every level etc. Using App Engine is a course on best practices in web development.
nlake44 13y ago
Their traction numbers seem pretty impressive with over 3 million active applications, which they announced at Google IO of this year. Last year, iirc, it was around 1 million apps.
timothya 13y ago
I wouldn't exactly say that AppEngine doesn't have much traction. Every month, half the world's IP addresses touch some service hosted on AppEngine[1], which is a pretty huge number. [1]: And that statistic is more than a year old now (from 2012's Google I/O: http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/google-app-engine-by-the-numbers/ http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/google-app-engine-by-the-number...), it's a higher number now.
valhallarecords 13y ago
SnapChat uses App Engine: http://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-building-on-google-compute-engine/ http://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-build... So does Khan Academy. Ben Kamens, their lead developers, writes a lot of great App Engine tips on his blog: http://bjk5.com/post/54202245691/the-app-engine-way http://bjk5.com/post/54202245691/the-app-engine-way

martin_ 13y ago

Any plans to support PHP? It seems to be the only missing engine before being a complete clone https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/

nlake44 13y ago
Author of AppScale here. We have php support on our road map. I suspect its about one to two sprints out.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  I submitted a presentation proposal about AppScale for this year's PythonBrasil (no word yet on whether it was approved). Is there anything in special I should highlight?
  - nlake44 13y ago
    Drop me an email at raj@appscale.com and we can discuss all the recent features we've added. One service we're able to provide because of AppScale's API is disaster recovery for GAE applications. We presented it recently at Gigaom's Structure conference: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130620-908833.html http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130620-908833.html

jagan123 13y ago

Appengine is already cheap and reliable. Why would anyone want it on other cloud providers?

nlake44 13y ago
I agree. The private case may be more appealing though. App developers might have some enterprise customers who want to run their applications behind a firewall.
sktrdie 13y ago
Because if they increase their prices, as they have done in the past already, you may still want the freedom of hosting your app somewhere else.
- bitbitbit 13y ago
  Misleading statement. They did not "increase" the price so to speak. The platform came out of beta and into normal pricing mode. The low prices were introductory prices to get developers to use the platform.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - nnnnni 13y ago
    The price is higher than it was before, correct? In that case, it was increased.
    - bitbitbit 13y ago
      Increased back to the original price. Yes. It was not higher than the original price and the prices have gone down a little since. Nice play on words there. :)
  - pekk 13y ago
    You are playing with words. The price of using the service increased dramatically.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

moondowner 13y ago

Nice! A complete clone of GAE is really handy to be able to use in some cases. Note that you can also run Java GAE apps on JBoss AS or OpenShift with CapeDwarf: https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf

jwheeler79 13y ago

AppScale are notorious for spamming the official GAE mailing list, and for that reason alone, I'd be cautious dealing with them

rbanffy 13y ago
I'm looking at the google-appengine group and there are three messages with the word "appscale" in them since June. Am I looking into the wrong list?

drivebyacct2 13y ago

There's this as well, for those of you with showdead http://www.appscale.com/ http://www.appscale.com/

newtexan 13y ago

I've been working on porting an existing python based AE project to AS and so far so good. My companies' reasoning for putting time and resources into AppScale is for redundancy. AE is a great platform to develop for however it's not a 5 9s platform that's for sure.

jaytaylor 13y ago

This looks very similar to the ShipBuilder PaaS written in Go (https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder). I am excited to see all these open source PaaS systems beginning to emerge and mature. These all help to foster and sustain an environment which makes creating and hosting large-scale applications easier for developers. A considerable and big win in the OSS world if you ask me!

richardw 13y ago

I'd love a no-fidget version of GAE, where the underlying infrastructure wasn't 'upgraded' constantly, or at least was done on a very careful schedule. A good portion of issue mails from Google are 'we upgraded something and broke these things. btw, we care about reliability.' A project like this might encourage a hosting company to take that on. One disadvantage with Google is that your app can be affected by very many layers of goodness, including leaky abstractions that have nothing to do with GAE on the surface. Like when they blocked some Cloudflare somewhere down the stack and various Google sites were affected, including GAE and Blogger.