Google's plans for App Engine
Google just launched their cloud computing competitor to Amazon’s EC2 to a limited number of users. This begs the question, why is Google getting into cloud computing?
On the surface, Google is the perfect candidate for it. Their infrastructure was made for this kind of stuff. From Bigtable to GFS, Google was made to handle web applications with little thought on the programmer side. And that’s why it’s so appealing to programmers. No longer do you have to worry about RAID drives, backups, load balancing, provisioning instances or servers, data storage, file serving. . . You just have Google take care of that for you. As you need more resources, the App Engine provisions them (within your limits which I assume will have paid levels in the future).
But could there be something a little sinister going on here. Most programmers hate worrying about those infrastructure details so Google is likely going to get a lot of interest from the Web 2.0 crowd. Of course, choosing Google’s App Engine makes it hard for anyone except Google to buy you. All of a sudden, your code is written for Google’s infrastructure and not a more generic Linux setup.
While migration is possible, think of it this way: if you’re on Google’s infrastructure you’re less valuable to others because you’re beholden to Google. At the same time, you’re more valuable to Google because you’re already on their scalable infrastructure. That means that in any bidding war, Google has a huge edge and probably that your company will sell for less.
Most likely, Google is doing this to outsource development in a sense. Especially with their support of OpenSocial, Google’s App Engine can act as a perfect platform to tie into that. More importantly, Google is building hooks for their other services – want email in your app, tie into Gmail and if your app gets popular, Gmail gets more popular with it.
This seems like the perfect way for Google to be able to buy cheap startups and block their competitors from buying the Next Big Thing or get development tie-ins for their already existing services.