How Google App Engine changed outside Silicon Valley

from my Hatena Bookmark

(Google App Engineはシリコンバレー外をどう動かしたか)
First of all, sorry of my poor English, but I am improving myself little by little...
ON April 07.
From New York City, BusinessWeek, Rob Hof reported Google App Engine broadly accepted as Google's counterpart against Amazon Web Services, which has been provided enterprises with web applications "including the EC2 computing engine, the S3 storage service, and the SimpleDB database product."
However that was not his key point of view, because he thought as below:

That gives it not only good visibility into the kinds of applications people want and the problems it may need to overcome with them, but also a bird’s-eye view into the most promising new startups it might want to acquire.

Thus Rob Hof points out another interest for Google.
It makes a clear contrast BusinessWeek point of view with O'Reilly Radar's, for Brady Forrest on his blog post presumes Google App Engine is going to follow Amazon Web Services. Here is Forrest point of view:

It's about time that developers get access to Google's platform! We've been hearing about Google's server farms and development tools for years. After Amazon Web Services started doing so well we all knew it was just a matter of time (next will be Microsoft we can can safely assume).

O'Reilly Radar features web developer's point of view, which has been prominent among plenty of blog networks. I suppose O'Reilly Radar is one of the most popular English web sites in Japan, which means it has a lot of readers from Japan, even though no translator stands by. (In general, most of Japanese office workers tend to skip reading English articles because there are millions of good translators in their firms.)
This Brady Forrest blog post had sevral readers from Japan, especially web-orientated tech pundits (here are the examples: Hatena Bookmark, a SBM.)
BusinessWeek from New York City makes clear contrast with O'Reilly Radar from Silicon Valley because it argues Google is looking further at economic situations. Rob Hof maintains his idea that Google knows "as well as anyone else that a lot of Web startups are going to be for sale as the economy sours even further, and Google is ready to snap up the ones that are most promising."
Outside Silicon Valley, hundreds of blog posts on App Engine have been observed in these 10 days.
Here is the list of excellent posts I found with brief quotations.

Jack Schofield cynically:"It will also put Google in a position where they know each company's business backwards and can take them over, knowing they are already compatible with Google's proprietary software and services. (Doesn't this sound like a tribe of cannibals opening a nursery school?)"

Clint Ecker observes: "Why would a developer want to deploy their application on Google's servers and within Google's constraints? First up, it allows you, the developer, to begin coding without having to worry about all the nitty-gritty issues involved with hosting, buying expensive hardware, and scaling your code."

Cade Metz presumes:"available today as a free "preview release," and with this release, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. But somewhere down the road, Google will hawk more storage, more cycles, and more bandwidth at some unknown price."

Nisha Gandhi presumes:"It is perhaps getting crowded over there on the cloud, but Google is making a bet that its flexible hosting capability -- and its reputation as a data-management and -- serving giant -- will give it the inside track."

Richard MacManus maintains his concern about startups adoption:"However, there are a few downsides to the Google approach. For one thing, it means developers must use Python as their programming language - PHP and Ruby are two other popular languages today."

Jack Schofield citing Ars Technica, maintains: "once you have written your Google application, you have no reasonable way of getting it out and moving it somewhere else. It's a lobster pot."
To note, these are the locations of publishers:

  • Guardian: UK
  • Ars Technica: Massachussets
  • Register: UK
  • eBranz: India
  • ReadWriteWeb: New Zealand

I found a lot of clever suggestions from CNET News.com and ZDNet.com in San Francisco (inside Silicon Valley, I suppose) but today I would not refer to these clever suggestions, because my hands have got only 10 fingers, sorry.
Outside Silicon Valley I found sevral eminent tech pundits, including Jack Schofield, Cade Metz, Nisha Gandhi, Richard MacManus. Especially from UK, Jack Schofield has a great point of view.
Jack Schofield posted two Google App Engine observation. the first was entiled "Google follows Amazon into Web-apps business." This post title seems rather different from its article, because Schofield cynically observes Google "like a tribe of cannibals opening a nursery school." Though I am not very familiar with Silicon Valley optimism, Jack Schofield has more like British accent when he talks about technology people. It is simply interesting to me. Perhaps British tech pundits are going to find outstanding position among plenty of blog posts, for British accent is famous for its cool intelligence with detachment.
In recent days, I found in Google News there were a lot of prominent blog posts from India. For example, eBranz features "Search Marketing & Technology News" with staff editors staying at San Francisco and so on. This article by Nisha Gandhi seems prominent to me because he not only reports collectly from San Francisco but presumes precisely.
Here are the most prominent lines.

Google summed up that its servers are configured to balance the load of traffic to developers’ applications, scaling to meet the demand of an influx of traffic. App Engine also includes APIs for user verification to allow developers to sign on for services, and for e-mail, to manage communications.
It is perhaps getting crowded over there on the cloud, but Google is making a bet that its flexible hosting capability -- and its reputation as a data-management and -- serving giant -- will give it the inside track.
“Our imagination with Google App Engine is to provide developers a more holistic, end-to-end solution for building and scaling applications online,” a Google spokesman said in a statement.
Google, which plans to continue offering a free, basic level of App Engine service even after the initial period, kept mum on how it will price the service for additional resources, when the App Engine goes live.

Gandhi's observation does not lack of technical and economic concern, and gives further suggestion for readers. I keep on following eBranz blog posts for the time.