The question may sound a bit stupid but I think it's interesting. Is it possible to upload a GAE application (java or python) from another GAE application ? I mean to use the first GAE app purely as a build server (e.g. http://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo/overview ) to build / deploy an application.
It would be technically possible to do this with some tweaking, but the Terms of Service prohibit apps that upload other apps.
It sounds interesting to me, but ultimately I'm not sure of the practicality of it. You'd have to spend quite a bit of effort to modify the SDK to replace all file operations, and emulate the development filesystem on either the filestore or blobstore.
I say I don't think it's practical, because unless you're running strictly as backends (which ends up being expensive), none of the frontends really last long enough to emulate a debugger. It would be very difficult to develop software if you can't debug.
That and what Nick said.
I recently had to realize a project on Google AppEngine. At the beginning I was sceptic. But there a some really nice approaches on Appengine:
No server setup. Everything works out of the box. Gzip, libraries, etc.
One-Click-Deployment. Fire up GAE Launcher on the Mac and click DEPLOY. Done.
Low costs
Easy in-production-logging
But there are some things I don't like if I'm thinking about professional projects
The blobstore. It's just... weird. And non-backupable
All the 1 MB restrictions
The feeling that your code will only run on AppEngine. (BigTable)
Do you know any similar alternatives to AppEngine? And I don't mean services like EC2.
You can have a look at AppScale
Its an open-source implementation of AppEngine which you can deploy on your own machines, with a host of databases to choose from.
I think Heroku is a great alternative.
It can run most of GAE existing apps, since it supports django, but also:
It supports Ruby (w or w/o Rails), Java (w or w/o Spring), Node.js, Clojure,...
It has a strong CLI support (git push for publishing, creation of apps, scaling, log, ps,...)
It supports MySql and PostgreSQL (and, so on, MongoDB, Amazon RDS, etc.)
It has a free tier for 750 hours a month (~1 machine always up) for every app.
It has a collection of addons for providing cloud services as a resources for the apps
It has an add-on program to develop your own add-ons.
Really, it is a good alternative.
If you want your application is not binded to GAE, the best approach is to use well-known langs and well-known persistence providers. Ruby+PostgreSQL, for instance, could be a combination very portable. Django as well, but w/o BigTable...
AppScale and TyphoonAE are both third-party implementations of the App Engine platform. TyphoonAE is targeted at small-to-medium scale, while AppScale is targeted at the large-scale end of things.
As far as backing up the blobstore goes, this is quite doable: just use the built in handler to serve blobs, and, in conjunction with remote_api, you can download your blobs just fine.
I almost hate to mention Microsoft in a Google-related question, but I'm completely vendor-agnostic. So, I'll offer Microsoft's Azure as a platform that offers many similarities to AppEngine but enough differences that it might fit as a good answer to your question.
Azure and AppEngine are similar in that they are both designed to allow you to build easily scalable applications. Azure gives you Microsoft's standard web toolkit options: C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET ASP.NET MVC, but also offers PHP. It has a NoSQL, document database like AppEngine but also gives you the option of choosing a more standard instance of SQL Server. Although I haven't used it myself, it looks like AppEngine for Business now offers SQL, too.
Azure gives you a ready means of having long-running background processes. AppEngine does not to the best of my knowledge.
From my perspective, AppEngine has the huge advantage of charging you for usage only when a request is actually being processed. An Azure instance causes you to get billed even for time that it is completely idle. That's entirely typical, but the fact that Google doesn't so it that way makes me choose AppEngine every time. My budget is too tight to allow me to spend money for idle CPU hours.
There's a port of django to non-relational databases that works with app engine or mongodb.
google for django non-rel
documentation is a bit sparse though
may i know how portability is gae application. let say i have an
application that using comet feature, task queue..etc and not using
bigtable and i want to deploy on vmware/amazon will it run?
No. Google App Engine and Amazon Cloud Services have different APIs.
Many of the concepts are similar; it would certainly be possible to port many applications between the two and achieve similar functionality - but you'd have to modify a lot of code. If you have a lot of data stored in one system, you'd have to write custom code to export it from that system and import it into the other, too.
AppScale is designed for this kind of portability.
AppScale is a platform that allows
users to deploy and host their own
Google App Engine applications. It
executes automatically over Amazon EC2
and Eucalyptus as well as Xen and KVM.
It has been developed and is
maintained by the RACELab at UC Santa
Barbara. It supports both the python
and java Google App Engine platforms.
Can't say for sure if it's something that will work for you but it's probably worth looking into.
We are using GAE to host our web services, as far as I know GAE only support Java and python at the moment, however most of our engineers here are more comfortable with C/C++, so i was wondering if there is a way to integrate gsoap with GAE at all. Thanks for your help!
Though I am not an expert at Google App Engine, it is unlikely you'd be able to use native C++ code in the app engine. Based on experience with an app engine like Tomcat, the purpose of application engines is to make your application run on a shared service in its own little sandbox so that it can't affect the other shared services. With C++, you can get a pointer to the beginning of the process memory and start writing zeros if you so desired. This doesn't turn out to work too well in a shared computing environment.
The app engine pages indicate Java and Python runtime environments are available. I've been using C++ for many years and am a big fan of gSoap, but I think these are tools best used in limited cases these days. Web services for Java aren't that much different from gSoap in terms of ramp-up time anyway.
I've used Axis2 for Java web services and it isn't that difficult to use. However, I think it suffers from being overly complex and under documented. I have used WSO2 under PHP and was impressed with how easy it was to use. WSO2 is built on top of Axis and has a Java port too (though I have not used it). If your engineers want to dig in, WSO2 is probably going to be the easiest route.
Motivating them might be hard, but my take is that if they are real software engineers then they won't have a problem adapting.
This might be helpful too: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html
The short answer is No, Google-App engine is very limited with what you can do (you can't even dynamically create new files).
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What alternatives are there to GAE, given that I already have a good bit of code working that I would like to keep. In other words, I'm digging python. However, my use case is more of a low number of requests, higher CPU usage type use case, and I'm worried that I may not be able to stay with App Engine forever. I have heard a lot of people talking about Amazon Web Services and other sorts of cloud providers, but I am having a hard time seeing where most of these other offerings provide the range of services (data querying, user authentication, automatic scaling) that App Engine provides. What are my options here?
AppScale
AppScale is a platform that allows users to deploy and host their own Google App Engine applications. It executes automatically over Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus as well as Xen and KVM. It has been developed and is maintained by AppScale Systems. It supports the Python, Go, PHP, and Java Google App Engine platforms.
http://github.com/AppScale/appscale
In the mean time...
...it is amost 2015 and it seems that containers are the way to go forward. Alternatives to GAE are emerging:
Google has released Kubernetes, container scheduling software developed by them to manage GCE containers, but can be used on other clusters as well.
There are some upcoming PaaS on Docker such as
http://deis.io/
http://www.tsuru.io/
even Appscale themselves are supporting Docker
Interesting stuff to keep an eye on.
I don't think there is another alternative (with regards to code portability) to GAE right now since GAE is in a class of its own. Sure GAE is cloud computing, but I see GAE as a subset of cloud computing. Amazon's EC2 is also cloud computing (as well as Joyent Accelerators, Slicehost Slices), but obviously they are two different beasts as well. So right now you're in a situation that requires rethinking your architecture depending on your needs.
The immediate benefits of GAE is that its essentially maintenance free as it relates to infrastructure (scalable web server and database administration). GAE is more tailored to those developers that only want to focus on their applications and not the underlying system.In a way you can consider that developer friendly. Now it should also be said that these other cloud computing solutions also try to allow you to only worry about your application as much as you like by providing VM images/templates. Ultimately your needs will dictate the approach you should take.
Now with all this in mind we can also construct hybrid solutions and workarounds that might fulfill our needs as well. For example, GAE doesn't seem directly suited to this specific app needs you describe. In other words, GAE offers relatively high number of requests, low number of cpu cycles (not sure if paid version will be any different).
However, one way to tackle this challenge is by building a customized solution involving GAE as the front end and Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, and SQS) as the backend. Some will say you might as well build your entire stack on AWS, but that may involve rewriting lots of existing code as well. Furthermore, as a workaround a previous stackoverflow post describes a method of simulating background tasks in GAE. Furthermore, you can look into HTTP Map/Reduce to distribute workload as well.
As of 2016, if you're willing to lump PaaS (platform as a service) and FaaS (function as a service) in the same serverless computing category, then you have a few FaaS options.
Proprietary
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app.
AWS Step Functions complements AWS Lambda.
AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application. Step Functions provides a graphical console to arrange and visualize the components of your application as a series of steps. This makes it simple to build and run multi-step applications. Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries when there are errors, so your application executes in order and as expected. Step Functions logs the state of each step, so when things do go wrong, you can diagnose and debug problems quickly. You can change and add steps without even writing code
Google Cloud Functions
As of 2016 it is in alpha.
Google Cloud Functions is a lightweight, event-based, asynchronous compute solution that allows you to create small, single-purpose functions that respond to cloud events without the need to manage a server or a runtime environment. Events from Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud Pub/Sub can trigger Cloud Functions asynchronously, or you can use HTTP invocation for synchronous execution.
Azure Functions
An event-based serverless compute experience to accelerate your development. It can scale based on demand and you pay only for the resources you consume.
Open
Serverless
The Serverless Framework allows you to deploy auto-scaling, pay-per-execution, event-driven functions to any cloud. We currently support Amazon Web Service's Lambda, and are expanding to support other cloud providers.
IronFunctions
IronFunctions is an open source serverless computing platform for any cloud - private, public, or hybrid.
It remains to seen how well FaaS competes with CaaS (container as a service). The former seems more lightweight. Both seem suited to microservices architectures.
I anticipate that functions (as in FaaS) are not the end of the line, and that many years forward we'll see further service abstractions, e.g. test-only development, followed by plain-language scenarios.
Alternatives:
1. AppScale
2. Heroku.
Ref: Alternative for Google AppEngine?
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 is a good option. You basically run Linux VMs on their servers that you can control via a web interface (for powering up and down) and of course access via SSH or whatever you normally set up...
And as it's a linux install that you control, you can of course run python if you wish.
Microsoft Windows Azure might be worth consideration. I'm afraid I haven't used it so can't say if it's any good and you should bear in mind that it's a CTP at the moment.
Check it out here.
A bit late, but I would give Heroku a go:
Heroku is a polyglot cloud application platform. With Heroku, you
don’t need to think about servers at all. You can write apps using
modern development practices in the programming language of your
choice, back it with add-on resources such as SQL and NoSQL databases,
Memcached, and many others. You manage your app using the Heroku
command-line tool and you deploy code using the Git revision control
system, all running on the Heroku infrastructure.
https://www.heroku.com/about
You may also want to take a look at AWS Elastic Beanstalk - it has a closer equivalence to GAE functionality, in that it is designed to be PaaS, rather than an IaaS (i.e. EC2)
If you're interested in the cloud, and maybe want to create your own for production and/or testing you have to look at Eucalyptus. It's allegedly code compatible with EC2 but open source.
I'd be more interested in seeing how App Engine can be easily coupled with another server used for CPU intensive requests.
TyphoonAE is trying to do this. I haven't tested it, but while it is still in beta, it looks like it's atleast in active development.
The shift to cloud computing is happening so rapidly that you have no time to waste for testing different platforms.
I suggest you trying out Jelastic if you are interested in Java as well.
One of the greatest things about Jelastic is that you do not need to make any changes in the code of your application, except the changes for your application functionality, but not for the reason the chosen platform demands this. With reference to this you do not actually waste your time.The deployment process is just flawless, and you can deploy your .war file anywhere further.Using GAE requires you to modify the app around their system needs. In case if you happen to get working with Java and start looking for a more flexible platform, Jelastic is a compatible alternative.
You can also use Red Hat's Cape Dwarf project, to run GAE apps on top of the Wildfly appserver (previously JBoss) without modification.
You can check it out here:
http://capedwarf.org/