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Last night Google announced something that we should all take note of. Google App Engine is a platform that can do all of the things you can imagine your website or web application doing already, and more. If you are building your first startup or writing code for the enterprise, this is a fast track for development. Provided are all of the Google APIs that your local developer is accustomed to but now as they write the code it actually gets implemented and ran on Google servers, using Google bandwidth and stored in the giant Google database, BigTable. All of this is exciting, and I am going to get started on something soon, but I am also going to have to evaluate a few things too.

This is a small list of what you get on the Google App Engine platform:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Well, OK, that is enough to get me motivated. My users can login with their Google username. My site will work seamlessly with OpenSocial, provided I write it to do so. I am willing to bet that the Google search engine will love the sites hosted on Google’s App Engine. The APIs are well written and documented, should be able to spin something up quickly… All of these are excellent reasons to jump on board, so why am I reluctant?

Imagine this scenario for a moment: I write the next killer webapp, millions of people from all walks of life are on my site; and they love it. I am on the front of Wired and PBS wants to do a documentary about how cool I am.

OK, maybe I am not going to create the next Facebook or LinkedIn, but someone is going to do so soon, and perhaps on the Google App Engine. So what happens if Google does something that the developer of this new megasite doesn’t care for? What happens if Google raises the price to host or changes a rule to make all of the data open to Google itself?

Once the site is written against the Google App Engine API, stored on the Google File System (GFS) and served on Google’s own webservers; is there even a chance you can port it off? I might write a portion on the Google App Engine, but some of it would have to be written for and stored on my own infrastructure. Just to be safe.

Matt

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