Django and More on Google App Engine with App Engine Patch

I’ve recently had the chance to play with Waldemar Kornewald’s “Google App Engine Patch” and have come away very impressed. All LittleShoot Google App Engine (GAE) projects now run on it for a couple of simple reasons:

1. Seamless Django integration (including 1.0.1)
2. Thorough documentation
3. Healthy open source development community with an excellent steward in Kornewald and frequent new releases

The Django integration got me first. Almost everything works, such as manage.py, Django authentication, Django testing (the original reason I switched), etc. There are also lots of other goodies in there, like support for boto’s SQS module. If you’re unfamiliar with it, boto SQS allows you to call Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) from Python. That’s a huge step in getting around GAE’s limitation on longer lived, CPU-intensive tasks. Just queue it up in SQS, and your GAE app will keep humming along fine — cloud integration at its finest.

To get started with App Engine Patch, download the zip file from the home page and work off the sample project. The download includes App Engine Patch itself as well as the sample project.  

With Django App Engine Helper not supporting Django 1.0 and seemingly inactive, App Engine Patch is a godsend and gets a huge thumbs up.

Great work Waldemar, and don’t forget to donate.

Amazon Web Services vs. Google App Engine: The Race to the One-Click Cloud

Can Amazon Build the One-Click Cloud?

It’s a great time to program for the cloud, no matter what Ted Dziuba’s entertaining but barely coherent rants have to say (will someone get that guy some experience?). Amazon and Google are going toe-to-toe, with Amazon’s addition of sorting in Simple DB bringing it up to par with Google App Engine’s Datastore API. Sorting was the biggest missing piece in Simple DB and the most compelling reason to choose the Datastore API instead. No longer.  

But Google App Engine (GAE) and the Datastore API still win. Here’s why:

1. The Datastore API is projected to be 10x cheaper. $0.15-$0.18 per GB-month sounds a lot better than Simple DB’s $1.50 per GB-month.
2. GQL. GAE’s SQL subset is just brain dead simple. As adept as programmers are at learning new frameworks, it’s nice to have something brain dead every once in awhile. Simple DB takes a few more cycles to learn (brain cycles that is — more coffee and such. Modafinil perhaps? Anyone tried it? I’m curious).
3. GAE has better Object Relational Mapping (ORM). GAE basically uses Django’s sweet ORM system. You’ve got to jump through a lot more hoops to get something as nice with Simple DB. 
4. GAE automatically scales the web application, not just the database. With Amazon, you have to add load balancing and bring machines up and down yourself, even if you’re using Simple DB. While there are third-party tools to help, they’re not built-in. Again, GAE is brain dead here.  

Sure, App Engine only supports Python. The ultimate question, though, is what functionality can you get in the end? For web apps, App Engine gives you more, particularly for scaling (which is kind of the whole point). Don’t know Python? Learn it. It will save you time in the end. Instead of endlessly fiddling with your load balancer and custom scripts for bringing instances up and down, you’ll spend your time adding the next killer feature your users will love.

In the end, the Amazon/Google “main event” is a huge win for you, me, and our users. The sorting announcement from Amazon comes on the heals of a flurry of other new features from both companies, including Amazon’s impressive persistent storage addition for EC2 called the Elastic Block Store, querying by attributes on Simple DB, GAE’s support for 10 applications per user instead of 3, GAE’s batch writes, etc. Neither one is pulling any punches, and the tools at our disposal as developers are progressing at a breathtaking pace as a result.

Amazon’s is clearly the more complete offering (you can do anything on it, in any language), but it needs to learn from Google’s focus on the dominant deployment scenarios.  Amazon could easily win if it does the following:

1. Makes Simple DB pricing competitive with Google’s projected prices.
2. Adds a query language for Simple DB along the lines of GQL.
3. Adds automatic scaling for web applications, not just the database.
4. Offers complete deployment solutions for the dominant web applications frameworks, from Tomcat/Spring/Hibernate to Django and Zend, with ORM models already adapted to Simple DB, instances automatically replicated with traffic, etc. Basically the same thing as App Engine for more web app frameworks than App Engine supports and adapted to the Amazon platform. Sure, there are third-party solutions for some of this stuff, but those will never be trusted as much as something offered directly from Amazon.

I’m a big fan of Amazon and Werner Vogels (one of the most innovative people in the industry, and also apparently a pretty nice guy), but Amazon desperately needs to learn from what Google has done. It’s ultimately a question of “usability” for developers. The originators of “one-click shopping” are losing in the game they practically invented. 

Amazon needs to turn on the one-click cloud.