Guido van Rossum (GVM) obviously pulled rank on Steve Yegge (SY) and presumably GAE was already under way before GROR. I would certainly imagine SY’s GROR seeing light of day along with Google’s CVM (Cloud Virtual Machine) with JVM languages. I’m now thinking the language order might even be Python (obviously), Java, Javascript (GROR) followed by the rest and excluding C++, my assumption here is that they build their CVM on Sun’s JVM. Although they could pull an android and not use the JVM but instead use there own Java runtime. If Google was paranoid and wanted complete control in their cloud infrastructure, using their own Java engine removes the third party reliance on Sun for the JVM. The disadvantage to this route is they loose all that has been built on the JVM, like extra language support etc..

But what do you get with GAE, what’s the real killer benefit of using it? As someone who has been building and maintaining web applications for nigh on a decade I have come to appreciate the advances in frameworks and libraries. When Ruby on rails (ROR) appeared web app developers suddenly found they could create basic prototypes in record time. In many ways ROR was the climax of MVC domain modeling based around the combination of web server, MVC code and SQL backends. Unfortunately ROR is the climax of an old paradigm that does not scale as easily as it could. If you look at the backend of successful web players like Ebay, Amazon, Google etc..Their architectures are very different from the traditional 3 tier model ROR was built on. The architectures that are used by these organisations are designed with rather different goals for example.

• Huge distributed storage
• Load balanced storage
• load balanced models/views
• Distributed session replication
• Joins replaced by indexes
• Map reduce rather than SQL
• High fault tolerant
• Transparent failover
• Multi datacenter and location

All of these features solve issues that we (My companies & clients) have had to deal with manually in the past. Building solutions to these features is hugely time consuming and implementation is extremely costly. Google with GAE have just delivered most of these absolutely free of charge, with GAE you don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore it’s done for you. This isn’t just evolution it’s the next logical stage in web app development and what’s more it will be available to anyone with an PC, internet connection and rudimentary knowledge of Python. Oh and for the traditionalists they even provide GQL so you 3 tierers feel right at home! So guess what, if you are a small web apps developer do yourself a favour learn python and get coding for GAE it’s a lot easier than building everything on the list, you will be laughing all the way to the bank at your ROR competitors. There are also some great killer development features such as instant deployment and version control along with an administrative console.

Of course anything thats is as innovative as this is bound to put a few noses out of joint, those that have most to loose by its arrival. Already I hear negative rumblings in the ROR community, my take on that? Do what Google has done with python on their infrastructure, build something scalable and competitive that supports your beloved framework. The biggest problem for anyone competing is likely to be ‘Free’, you could build a ruby applications engine using AWS, but who would sponsor the ‘Free’ version?

Where is Microsoft in all this, well I guess they have their own cloud (red dog?) ideas based around similar features and using their own preferred languages like C# and Basic/ASP on their CLR. They might even throw a bone to the ROR folks via an ironruby cloud infrastructure, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But we also need to consider what we are getting into with GAE, if we build into GAE we are locking ourselves into Google’s future. During the campfire announcements the presenters kept using the ‘P’ word (‘Platform’,’our platform’ etc..),so lets be careful out there folks, we know how it turned out with the Microsoft Platform don’t we..

P.S. Anyone spot my purposeful error in this post regarding GAE features?

So lets talk about money, once upon a time money was made out of stuff that had real value like gold and silver. When successful folks (todays equivalent of business folks) got lots of it they developed a security problem. Keeping their real money value safe was a job they had to achieve through physical means, like hiding it away in what they considered secure places in their establishments or even on their person. Unfortunately this was a risky business and many of these folks were often fleeced both personally and via their establishments. Some saw this issue as an opportunity and started services to safeguard folks wealth on their behalf. These innovative entrepreneurs of their time created secure buildings to house folks valuables under lock and key, charging for the privilege of securing their goodies. Soon these entrepreneurs thought of even better ways to provide their security services, they would use the funds secured in their premises to create new value which they could loan to other entrepreneurs that had great ideas or big projects requiring investment.

In case you haven’t worked out what I’m talking about yet, the securing establishments were of course what we now know of as banks, the techniques they begun to employ were ‘leveraging’ making more value out of entrusted value, money in this case. So why the hell am I talking about banks and money, this is meant to be an educational cloud computing post no? Which brings me to my point, there is actually a very important connection between that period and now regarding value and trust. You see decades before this time if you had suggested to the well to do business folk of the era that they let someone else look after their money, they would have laughed you off their land, probably waving a large pointy stick for effect. But of course things change, folks get used to such innovative ideas and get over their irrational fears.

Well it turns out right now that business data (another form of value) is rather similar to where money was all those years ago. Innovative cloud computing entrepreneurs are suggesting that maybe they would be better looking after the businesses data than the businesses themselves, in many cases they have good reasons to do so. They can specialise in securing such data better than any individual business because they are in the ‘looking after data’ business. Many businesses are however waving pointed words at the evangelists representing the new Data vaults, chasing them away as fast as they approach. This will of course change and many businesses are already seeing through the thin veneer of change to reap the operational benefits of concentrating on their business instead. Indeed the more entrepreneurial Data Vaults are also now playing the leverage card whereby data entrusted with them is being leveraged to create further and greater value enabling them to offer lower cost (even free) data services.

So what I am suggesting here? data = money? Not quite, but your data is valuable just like money, I would also suggest that just like the money which you entrust your bank with, is very similar to how you should treat your data. That is come to terms with the fact that the right third party is likely to do a better job of securing or leveraging that data than you could ever expect to. So the question for yourself is really just who you trust with it and under what terms would you feel comfortable. What you should not do is chase those that have already had the vision to see this with sharp pointey sticks, instead do your self a favour and engage them in conversation and confront your fears..

*Note this post was originally posted here

I’m not alone in thinking that Google may do things differently with their cloud offerings, Winer thinks they will go with the freemium model (free and payed premium options) unlike Amazon’s AWS which is pay only. Freemium makes a great deal of sense for Google and is a model they obviously like, just take a look at Google Apps, it follows the freemium model perfectly. Google also has a history of doing free first and finding a business model after. In terms of business models there are a number of suggestions. Winer suggests reduced cost for Google technology acquisitions, the cloud acts as a combined VC/Technology platform, thus when they acquire successful implementations on their platform, integration into Google becomes a breeze. They also gain mindshare allowing educational establishments to use their cloud for free, becoming part of the curriculum. There is also a huge identity battle going on right now with Microsoft,Yahoo etc.. this move could deliver a fatal blow to the other identity players if the Google cloud use became prolific. In addition successful implementations would likely move to the premium GCloud, bringing in direct revenue. Ok enough speculation around Google’s motive and business models lets crack into how the hell they could do it.

Now if we assume they go the freemium route, they would need a system that can scale with free. This is no mean feat, free can get pretty prolific very fast, if free meant everyone got an EC2 equivalent that could add up to a severe drain on even Google’s resources. This is where I believe Google may ‘think different’, they will need more control and greater scalability without limiting innovation. Also I believe they will want to make it easier to get started than the current AWS offerings, they would need a shorter learning curve. In this sense the GCloud would need to have some basic constraints and familiar development models to attract modern web application builders. So how will they do it, what will the cloud be made of, how will regular web developers use it?

So here is the really speculative part, if we assemble together Steve Yegge’s Next Big Language (NBL) and his recent project G-ROR (No not Ruby On Rails, it’s Rhino On Rails) as well as his top secret project NBE (Next Big Environment?) we can pick up some important clues. This are useful for several reasons:

1. Google intend using this stuff internally to build apps (at least prototyping them)
2. It is a perfect vehicle to build google API infrastructure into (GData,Search,OS..)

So what is NBE? My guess is that NBE is a combination of Java Virtual Machines (JVM) plus supporting Google API libraries with security wrappers. Here is how it could work; Google’s equivalent of EC2 would be a Cloud Virtual Machine (CVM), this CVM can run any suitable Java byte code that has been built with the CVM toolkit. The CVM toolkit does some sanity checking etc..to prevent abuse. Each CVM acts like a secure independent system (note – not operating system) isolated from the others with controls to enable you (or Google) to start, stop and control it remotely via a CVM API. These CVM instances will of course run in the Google managed datacentres.

So how will developers build the CVM apps? To start with I believe they will use G-ROR, a rails like development platform that includes an equivalent to active record for GData, allowing data to be stored in the GCloud transparently. It will be a development model that many are already familiar with, one which has already shown itself to be popular and very quick to get up to speed with. The main difference will be that the programming language (initially) will be Javascript rather than Ruby, this will appeal to an even wider developer audience, Google loves javascript in case you haven’t noticed – NBL?.

So there you have it, that is how they could deliver cloud computing ABC economically and with the constraints/controls required for a freemium model. They could run numerous CVM instances per server to make the whole infrastructure scalable and financially viable.

I think they could also offer premium CVMs, with extra features (more memory, dedicated processors etc..) building ontop of the JVM/CVM. They could for example offer existing server side language choices from the JVM such as JRuby, Jython, Groovy and Scala to name just a few. All of these compile down to Java byte code and could thus run on the CVM platform just by adding the required support libraries. And guess what, that would make Google’s CVM one of the most language accessible cloud platforms around, just look at how appealing that could be to the web developers everywhere (NBE?).

Of course this is all just idle speculation, but there may be a grain or two of truth to it. Does this Google cloud offer a developer’s silver lining ? I would be interested in what you think, does this idea appeal to you as a developer? Is what I am talking about severely floored? I am completely
nuts?,I wanna here you thoughts, go on let loose…

*Note this post was originally posted here