Google Apps Engine Gets SQL 66
oker writes "Google has finally added SQL to its cloud platform offering, Apps Engine. Until now, developers had to use the Datastore service, which provides a vendor lock-in threat and isn't supported by most existing software and libraries. The SQL service should definitely improve Apps Engine adoption. It is currently in limited preview mode."
Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure? (Score:2, Interesting)
There's practically nothing that Google offers that others don't (except for the price before), and they're still missing huge amount of stuff that their competitors offer, like htis addition of SQL just now tells. For example, A
Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yea, its really screwing people over when you start charging them for shit that you told them we're going to give away free for a while, then when we think its production ready we're going to charge for it ...
This is standard business practice for pretty much ANY business, if you didn't see this coming, you aren't qualified to make a statement about it because you simple don't know anything about running a business.
Also in the agreement that stated the price changes in the future was the part that said you'd have notice and given X amount of time when a service was going to be discontinued. If I recall correctly, the amount of time was 2 years, its not like they're just going to drop you into nothingness.
Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could you guys give the Google hating circlejerk a rest for a while? I know you're getting paid for it obviously, but it's getting kind of boring. Couldn't you find a job that doesn't involve trying to brainwash people?
Some of us value the integrity that Google has displayed over what Microsoft does. I view Amazon in the same light as Google. I'd be happy to use either of their services.
What products has Google discontinued recently? I remember they discontinued some really unpopular ones a good few years ago, and then they got rid of Wave recently.
*googles to check what happened to Wave*
Google Wave is no longer being developed as a standalone product
You can still log in, edit and export your waves, and wave.google.com will remain in service until there is another way to access your data.
Those bastards! I see why you hate them now! Oh wait, no I don't..
Re: (Score:2)
A simple fair question is fine - but these 2 posts repeatedly post their pro-MS (and I think pro Facebook, can't remember), anti-Google lines. It's clearly past the stage of ramptant fanboi, and into "we're getting paid to do this".
I admit that I'm quite a fan of Amazon and Google. I used to be a fan of Apple up until about 2000. I don't consider Amazon and Google infallible, but they've never caused me any problems so far, and I think they're having a positive effect on the world.
With MS and Apple, I'm amb
Re: (Score:2)
* first line was meant to say "but these 2 posters"
Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure? (Score:5, Informative)
PS MS are hardly known for keeping services going indefinitely [wikipedia.org]. Even when that means essentially a whole bunch of devices. You shills use some pretty bizarre arguments..
From what I've seen, if Google discontinue something, it's because 1) nobody is using it, or 2) they're consolidating the functionality into another product.
Re: (Score:2)
Sooo... kind of like what happened with PlaysForSure?
Actually, no.
Re: (Score:2)
My original comment was meant to say that they essentially bricked a whole load of devices, but I screwed up the tags. No matter how you try to twist things, Google haven't done anything like that. And if they did, I doubt it would be in quite as dramatically ironic fashion. "Plays For Sure" indeed..
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I guess you wouldn't be able to feel anything after a decade of being ruptured by Microsoft..
Re: (Score:2)
What the hell are you talking about? PlaysForSure is the certification platform upon which something called the Windows Media Rights Manager was built. The WMRM is the server side software that generates licenses for "protected" content for delivery to Windows Media Player, or anything else that happens to support it. WMRM is still available to license (at no charge, may I add) along with the PlaysForSure logo for third party MP3 players. That's not "discontinued" by any stretch of the term, and did not
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not a shill because I don't get paid to write half truths. Disliking Microsoft is just something that I've been doing for years before I'd heard of the internet. That makes me a kind of anti-fanboi or something, but not a shill.
Seems you're right, and that my "knowledge" of this area actually comes from sensationalist Slashdot headlines/comments at the time of the PlaysForSure debacle.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, nothing wrong with disliking Microsoft (or Apple, or Google - OK, I admit it, I don't actually really like any of them). I just wouldn't go trusting Slashdot headlines as authoritative sources of truth for anything regarding The Big Three tech companies. There's always an angle.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, EC2 is lower level, so you have to manage the whole stack. In App Engine they take care of managing everything up to your application - the OS, web server, app server, etc. And nothing stops you from using S3 with GAE.
I don't know Azure, though.
Re: (Score:2)
I think a more apt comparison to App Engine would be AWS' Elastic Beanstalk.
Re: (Score:2)
My apps all fall under the free thresholds. The "little" guy really hasn't been hurt by the changes. Google listened, and increased the number of free instance-hours to 28, allowing a free app to have a single idle instance all the time, with occasional spikes.
You do need to configure this though - I personally think that any free app should be automatically configured to be max 1 idle instance and maximum queue time.
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/09/few-adjustments-to-app-engines-upcoming.html [blogspot.com]
Re:Why Google Apps Engine over Amazon or Azure? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
It seems clear you haven't tried App Engine. You mention Azure's integration with Eclipse as something which competitors have that Google doesn't, except that the Google Eclipse plugin has provided the same (and dare I say better) integration with the Eclipse environment since App Engine launched, which was well before Azure. You then go on to allude to "services" that Amazon provides, which if you're referring to EC2 is a bit like comparing Gmail to exim4 with mutt, and if you're referring to the other A
Re: (Score:3)
Before Google Apps Engine had an edge with its free plans, but why would anyone seriously use it now when there are much more capable Amazon cloud and Microsoft Azure available?
The Amazon cloud offerings win on more than just specs. I have a Paypal credit card, but I don't live in the US. Thus, getting the physical plastic card to me is a hassle as I have to route it through someone in the US. That means that I've now been without my card for two months, and my Amazon bill has gone unpaid. When I got the "we're going to shut you down if you don't pay" letter, I wrote back explaining the situation and asked that they defer my payment until November with interest.
How did Amazon hand
Re: (Score:2)
Any company would buy goodwill if it cost them less than a dollar.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about that. I've had to swear off some places for less than a dollar for sure. The Amazon rep didn't know that I'd go on /. telling about the incident, in fact, I'm surprised that the rep had the authority to do what he did at all.
Re: (Score:2)
They likely have delegated authority for small amounts which they can use in a sales capacity. In general though, your offer to defer with interest would have costed more in administration costs than simply waiving it, and disconnecting you for less than a dollar is a major PR risk. Not to say Amazon doesn't have very good customer service - they do (I have a Kindle 3G with a damaged screen, out of warranty, and they say they'll replace it for $85 which comes with a new warranty and everything - they sure
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon knows how to keep customers.
That is why I like dealing with them!
Re: (Score:2)
What Google offers with App Engine (which still has the same distinction between free apps and apps with billing enabled as it has since billable features were first introduced) is not really directly competing with EC2, its more directly competing with services like Heroku that are built on top of EC2.
Compared to EC2, there's a lot
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Run along, kid. The adults are talking.
Re: (Score:2)
Except ... they lay out in their ToS that they give you a minimum amount of notice so you can move off if they discontinue a service. For AppEngine, thats 2 years I believe, and Google App Engine is not the only way to run apps for Google App Engine, you can also use the alternative OSS stack that will serve app engine apps: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ [google.com]
So ... if two years and a free alternative (free as in beer and speech) is 'leave me hanging' then you don't really belong in the tech industry, you w
Who uses app engine? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I think you misunderstand the point of App Engine. Varnish and HA-Proxy are things that are installed on servers to improve their performance. The idea behind using GAE is to remove yourself from needing applications of that variety at all. Using GAE, you don't have to worry about the server hardware, the operating system, the load balancer, caching, or any other system details; you just run a program. If fine tuning system architecture is your idea of fun, or is critical for your particular application
Re: (Score:1)
While I agree with your post in general, you don't have to derive your competitive advantage from your server infrastructure to not use a PaaS. Sometimes it's just difficult to abstract away all of those things (hardware, OS, other details).
Alternatively, you're a business that simply deals with requests beyond the 100 per second range; this doesn't make you one of the largest players in 2011.
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't happen, because Stunnel, Varnish, and HA-Proxy aren't things that an app needs, they are thing that an infrastructure layer might use to support functions that the Google App Engine platform already provides. You use App Engine because you distribution manageme
Fixed lockin the wrong way (Score:2)
Instead of allowing SQL which will probably never be a first class citizen, they should have opened their existing platform.
There is a good video of the Joyent CEO bashing Google at a panel with a Google representative right there.
Re: (Score:2)
There is AppScale [ucsb.edu], an open source implementation of App Engine which can run App Engine apps on your own web server -- that helps to mitigate the lock-in. I thought I read that a Google employee was behind at least the datastore implementation (but not doing it on Google's time).
Frankly, I think it's in Google's interest to make sure that App Engine apps are portable. That would be consistent with their philosophy of "we don't lock you in; we hope you stay because our service is the best."
Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine" (Score:1)
Are they allowed to call it "Apps Engine"? Don't Apple legally own the word "App" now?
OK, I'm being a bit pretentious I know- but considering Apple went after people for having "App Stores" - how much different is "App Engine"?
Is this another stupid patent/copyright fight waiting to happen?
Re: (Score:2)
Considering it launched before the App Store, I'm pretty sure Apple won't be so stupid to sue them over it.
Re: (Score:2)
Except it's not called "Apps Engine". Hell the linked article at the top says "Google App Engine Blog".
Re: (Score:2)
Well, considering App Engine was available to the public about 3 months before the App Store, I'd say Google would win that one.
Actually SQL? (Score:3)
The blogpost mentions a "familiar MySQL environment" ... that's not much SQL.
Competition and Standards... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying it's a good thing that they're competing their proprietary mindset against your open one.
Privacy (Score:2)
Gotta love pushing away data to those various cloud data provider.
I hope some people encrypt stuff and store in blobs (albeit, I'm sure, somewhere in the agreement this must be forbidden for funny reasons)
Re: (Score:2)
If your application is running on the same engine has the data storage, as in GAE, encrypting it doesn't really protect it from the provider.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope some people encrypt stuff and store in blobs (albeit, I'm sure, somewhere in the agreement this must be forbidden for funny reasons)
It's not forbidden at all. It's not very useful, though, because you have to decrypt the data sometime. If you do it in your code running on GAE then you might as well not have bothered. You can do it on the end-user's browser, in Javascript, but that doesn't make sense for many apps.
Now add PHP. (Score:2)
PHP is the #1 requested feature [google.com] for GAE and has been for several years. And Google has pretty much said no. BTW, perl is #3 and ruby is #4.
That is what people want. If I can take my app and move it to GAE, then it might be interesting. If I have to rewrite it in Java or Python...quite a bit less so. Sure, if I have a Java and Python app - and the man-hours to inevitably rewrite parts of it to work with GAE - then maybe I'm interested. Or if I'm starting from scratch, maybe. But honestly there are so
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You know, I could find that answer in probably about as much time as it to took you to ask it. I mean, this is slashdot, you'd think people could use the web. RTFFAQ [google.com].
Re: (Score:3)
Google banned the mental plague that is PHP from their "cloud"? That's awesome, I see that they're really keen on that "do no evil" thing.
There's no such thing as a free lunch (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch [wikipedia.org]