Can an application developed on Google App Engine be run any where else without heavy modification? I mean at a cooperate/private server?
If you are developing using GAE and GWT alone and not using any of the GAE specific services like mail, blobstore, memcache then you have nothing to worry about. You get tied down to GAE to the extent you use GAE services only. That said, you have to watch how you are accessing DataStore, as low level API's are going to lock you down to DataStore.
I haven't tried using AppScale and am assuming you were asking if you could host your web application on a standalone Tomcat/Glassfish server with a conventional RDBMS.
AppScale and TypoonAE are both projects which attempt to allow you to host your own App Engine compatible projects. Both are quite young and chasing the moving target that is GAE.
This question has been addressed elsewhere
You can use Appscale.
Please, refer to this post.
Related
I work for a big company - we are not to big on "open" technologies. Our security people are so paranoid that we cannot even login to most web-services (including Google!).
Us devs really like Google technologies, in particular the App engine. Given that we cannot host company services outside the company infrastructure can we do the opposite? I'd like to use some of our department's servers to make a small GAE-compatible grid and use them to run my own application.
We do not need the whole of the GAE experience, for example we do not need Google's APIs - I just want to use the Google BigTable technology for our private projects.
Can this be done?
FYI, We have about 10 servers available for this project (they do not have to all be used). And to complicate matters, most of our machines run Windows.
Thanks
AppScale http://github.com/AppScale/appscale
AppScale is an open-source hybrid cloud platform. AppScale implements
a number of popular APIs including those of Google App Engine,
MapReduce (via Hadoop), MPI and others. AppScale executes as a guest
virtual machine (guestVM) over any virtualization layer that can host
an Ubuntu Lucid image.
Typhoon App Engine http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/
The TyphoonAE project aims at providing a full-featured and productive
serving environment to run Google App Engine (Python) applications. It
delivers the parts for building your own scalable App Engine while
staying compatible with Google's API.
There is the the open source project AppScale which mimics the App Engine framework.
It being in development for quite some time and can be hosted on a private cloud.
Check out CapeDwarf (http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf):
JBoss CapeDwarf is an implementation of the Google App Engine API,
which allows applications to be deployed on JBoss Application Servers
without modification. Behind the scenes, CapeDwarf uses existing JBoss
APIs such as Infinispan, JGroups, PicketLink, HornetQ and others.
There are to popular clones of the Google's BigTable: HBase and Cassandra. Both implement the same concept but are built completely different internally. Selection between them depends on Your requirements for the consistency and high availability.
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.
I currently have a Grails application I'm evaluating to port to Google App Engine and I'd like to know experiences regarding:
Acegi security: the application relies on this library to enforce the security (update: just learned that it's based on hibernate so can't be ported; any recommended replacements?).
Use of JPA or JDO instead of the hibernate plugin (I'll have to migrate the Domain classes); which one is better ?
I have a growing number of pre-generated pdf files I keep uploading; is there any foreseeable problem with this?
Thanks in advance.
This isn't the answer you want, I'm sure, but I spent some time exploring Grails on GAE and finally came to the conclusion that it's not a good fit. By the time you give up (or work around) the native Domain capabilities, forego many of the plugins, and deal with the host of other minor incompatibilities, you've essentially wiped out most of the productivity advantage of Grails. I'd consider a standard J2EE, a compatible framework, or possibly a GWT based app for GAE. If you want to stick with Grails, I'd host it on AWS or a dedicated J2EE hosting provider.
That said, I hope the integration eventually works cleanly because GAE is a pretty cool engine/model.
You may also be interested in Gaelyk (http://gaelyk.appspot.com/) Gaelyk is a lightweight wrapper which enables you to deploy applications written in Groovy to the App Engine.
Gaelyk offers a lot of the advantages of Grails including:
standards for Views, Controllers
flexible URL routing
plugin system
It has simple wrappers for the App Engine (including datastore access and coercion to POJO/POGOs, email, memcache, Jabber & more)
(although it doesn't include internationalisation, CRUD scaffolding or a HQL type query wrapper)
As it is more lightweight it doesn't have the performance issues on App Engine that Grails does and now that you can reserve instances
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/instances.html#Always_On it is possible to remove the startup time problems!
I wrote a blog series about my experience with Grails on App Engine. It discusses most of your questions.
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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/