Google App Engine: Initial Thoughts

Google announced Google App Engine tonight. At first I thought it was going to more directly compete with Amazon’s EC2, S3, etc. It really doesn’t. What it gives you is a somewhat limited Python development environment to work in. I quickly read through the getting started docs. I really love Python, but I was initially a little under-whelmed after reading the initial docs. But then I realized that you could deploy an entire Django application (with minimal tweeks to use Google’s datastore) and, hmmm, that might be compelling. I’ve got a little project that I started a year and a half ago that I put on the backburner that I might just finish developing in Django (check out my Django Quickstart) and deploy it to the Google Engine. You can host Google Engine apps on your own domain, but, by default, Google Engine apps are deployed to APPNAME.appspot.com (I’ve got the exciting domain for my super-secret project!).

Clearly the big thing here is hosting your stuff with Google who have proved that they can make things perform well and scale and all that. Hmmmmm …. where to focus my limited time and resources ….

Anyway, I’d bet that the Google App Engine will help push Django over the edge and more into the mainstream …