It’s no secret that Google has been ramping up its enterprise offerings. The company has made a strong push for the adoption of Google Apps, launching the Apps Marketplace, allowing Apps users to add other layers to their environments from companies like Socialwok and Zoho. Today, Google is taking it one step further. At Google I/O today, the search giant has announced that Google App Engine, a platform for building and hosting web applications in the cloud, will now include a Business version, catered towards enterprises. The new premium version allows customers to build their own business apps on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Google is also announcing a collaboration with VMware for deployment and development of apps on the new cloud infrastructure.
Announced two years ago, Google App Engine offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. Last year, Google added the ability to build Java applications off of the platform. With the newly launched Google App Engine for Business, Google is introducing new enterprise-level capabilities, including centralized administration, premium developer support and an uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), flat monthly pricing, and soon, access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL. → Read More
We’ve been getting a number of tips about the Google App Engine API being down hard, causing a good number of third-party services who depend on it to fail or be downright inaccessible. A quick check on API-status, which tracks that sort of thing, confirmed the service disruption.
The outage was also confirmed by the App Engine team in a Google Groups discussion, making it clear this wasn’t a scheduled event. → Read More
A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.
That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups’ web apps. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing. → Read More
There has been some doubt lurking in the trenches about whether Google has a solid, organized enterprise strategy. But there have been some recent developments that indicate that Google might have a viable game plan to become a player in the enterprise space. Yesterday, Google rolled out Google Apps Directory Sync, a tool that will let businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps with Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino. Google says it’s using technology from Postini, security and compliance company Google acquired in 2007, to import information from users’ LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) systems, which includes mailing lists, groups, and user aliases, to a user’s Google Apps account. This utility will help many businesses, schools etc. who are currently using Google Apps save a lot of time and energy when it comes to importing information to their Google Apps system. → Read More
Google announced yesterday that they are going to strengthen Google Apps security by adding a Secure Data Connector (SDC) to its engine. SDC is built around having an agent inside the firewall, which connects to servers inside of Google. This gives Google servers policy-controlled access to data businesses have chosen to expose. Basically, SDC allows secure access to data behind firewall for use in cloud based apps hosted on App Engine. And Google also says that SDC and Oracle’s Siebel customer care and CRM software will be connected to the engine, showing an example of using the SDC to build an app behind a firewall. Oracle also announced that its Oracle Gadget Wizard, which lets users construct simple gadgets easily, will have support for Google Apps and can be integrated into Oracle’s CRM. SDC seems to be representative of Google’s intentions to be a serious player in the enterprise cloud computing space. With SDC and a partnership with Oracle, Google can now compete with Sun Microsystems, Salesforce and Microsoft, offering enterprises a cloud-based application that can combine the Apps engine with secure data behind a firewall. Other smaller business intelligence apps are jumping on the now enterprise-ready Google Apps engine. PivotLink, whose PivotLink Gadget allows Google Apps users to configure collaborative reports and dashboards, uses the Google Apps’ developer tools as a platform. Another SaaS, Panorama Software, launched a new version of its analytics software for Google Apps, and with the help of SDC can support any type of information residing inside the firewall. Panorama’s software analyzes, reports and visualizes data from Excel spreadsheets and CSV files. Google’s announcement about Java support may have been the most anticipated part of yesterday’s Campfire, but SDC will light a fire under enterprise players eager to pick side in the cloud war. CrunchBase Information Google Google App Engine Oracle Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We’re here at the Google campfire event, where Google is celebrating the first birthday of App Engine and is planning planning to unveil new developer-related features. The event is being held in Google’s Building 43 instead of an outdoor amphitheater because of rain, but Google has decked out the room with a virtual fireplace, log podium, and atmospheric lighting.
At this point Google hasn’t publicly announced what they’re launching tonight. We’ve heard that Java might be coming soon, but that could also be coming at Google’s I/O conference next month.
We’ll begin live blogging as soon as the event begins. For now, we’re live streaming video from inside the virtual campfire. → Read More
Google has released a new upgrade for its popular App Engine service that allows developers to pay to extend their application’s resource quotas beyond those that have historically been offered by the free service. According to Google this has been the platform’s most oft-requested feature, as developers with rapidly growing applications have been unable to expand beyond the set thresholds to meet demand. Developers will be able to set aside a specified amount of money each day, which will be distributed across fees related to CPU usage, bandwidth, storage space, and email (you keep any money that isn’t spent that day). For more details, check out the company’s blog post here. → Read More
It can be illuminating to compare the strategies of the major cloud platform vendors. Instead of matching currently exposed features, let’s imagine what each major player could do to tack away from competitor strengths and toward their own. For example, Google. Unlike Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure cloud, Google’s overall application architecture is firewalled off from direct developer access. Yes, AppEngine can be addressed directly, as can the Google APIs. But to date there is no easy way to engage with Gmail Labs unless you are a Google engineer with 20% of your time on your hands. If you’re a Salesforce, you can invest in API connectors and leverage your own cloud. Or you can add gadgets from your iGoogle toolchest. But harness the viral power of the social media wave and its central driver — the realtime experience? Google shuts you out as a power user developer, and in the process cedes the ball to smaller players. Take the central console experience as embodied by the Gmail/GReader/GApps container. IM feeds and services from FriendFeed, Twitter, TwitterSpy, Identi.ca, the open sourced Jaiku, and Leo Laporte’s XMPP engine (to name just the most visible) overwhelm the screen real estate. Yet there are limited tools to orchestrate these streams before they hit the IM stream. Then there’s the lack of intelligence in managing these multiple windows. Each reboot of FireFox mandates popping out the same set of windows and then dragging and resizing them into position. FireFox 3 added auto-recovery of tabs and their contents, but a FriendFeed realtime Gtalk IM pop-out when recovered has to be closed and reopened. No smarts, no access to user configuration, no continued disruption. Combining access to screen coordinates and routing of information to IM windows would likely result in an explosion of third party developers and aggregator tools. But what would happen to Google Reader in that scenario. Already we’re seeing growth in FriendFeed rooms as a workaround for GReader’s relatively locked down UI. Reports of the official release of the API notwithstanding, even then we still wouldn’t have access to the larger Gmail container to integrate the Google services under user control. By contrast, Live Mesh and eventually Azure may well offer console control on a device by device basis. It’s not that Google has a less expansive architecture, it’s that Google doesn’t appear interested in opening the platform up at the → Read More
Last night, Google announced App Engine, a hosted web application platform. We’ve now tested the service directly by writing and deploying a test application called appengine.crunchbase.com—a HotorNot popularity contest for startups. Our experience with building and launching an app is below. Google promises developers two things with App Engine: to reduce the time from writing code to deploying it on a web server, and to leverage Google’s massive infrastructure. We decided to write a simple app on the platform, deploy it, and get some traffic to really see how easy App Engine is. Getting Started Looking at the developer documentation, App Engine boasts a powerful API. The platform comes with a Python scripting runtime, static file serving capabilities, easy and tight integration with Google user accounts and email services (obviously a big play), simple access to a powerful persistence engine with queries and transaction support (aka a really good database), near real-time site monitoring and statistics, and the promise of consistent high performance and essentially linear scalability. Despite its potential power and underlying sophistication, App Engine was surprisingly easy to get started with. Now, being Ruby on Rails guys, the fact that the only currently supported language is Python was a bit humbling. Still, the SDK provided by Google proved dead simple. Our first application was contained within a single Python script, making the path the code was taking to produce responses very clear. We incrementally added features: first accepting input from the users through forms, then storing and retrieving that data using the provided persistence API, and finally breaking out the user-facing web page code into a proper Django template. The App The web app we came up with is super-simple, shamelessly self-promoting, and easily game-able. It’s a one-page voting site using company logos slurped in from CrunchBase, our main project. The app has only two requests: one for rendering the page, the other for recording a vote (one GET, one POST request). The first real issue was getting our initial data, some URLs and names, into the database. While we later found that Google provides a slick bulk-update tool, we got going with a simple action that manually parsed our comma-separated values into the database. Another thing we wanted from the service was it to be served from our own domain. By default, Google hosts all App Engine projects on your-project.appspot.com (think blogspot), but they do offer domain → Read More
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