Open Source Google App Engine Clone

https://github.com/AppScale/appscale

by frankhamlin • 13 years ago

187 43 13 years ago

github.com

niggatitus• 13 years ago

Does anyone have any experience with this project?

frankhamlin• 13 years ago

I tried it out on VirtualBox for some GAE apps I have. It was pretty easy to get going and the apps ran perfectly.

ShaneCurran_• 13 years ago

It's sponsored by Google (check the footer of README.md)

nikcub• 13 years ago

They need something to assure enterprise customers hosting with them (especially as Google are trigger happy with killing products). A lot of companies with enterprise clients will place their code into escrow, supporting an open alternative is better.

SEJeff• 13 years ago

Could this be due to GAE not getting as much traction as google had hoped?

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

Probably not, AppScale has been around for years now.

GAE's main customer is Google itself as far as I know, so I don't think they have any problems with traction. They certainty aren't priced or have the features necessary to get much traction outside Google at any rate.

They're a premium service with very harsh restrictions and poor portability. I gave them a try for awhile, but ultimately they have too many drawbacks and have been plagued with terrible issues such as 20sec+ start up times on GAE/Java. It's just not a great option considering you can get the same performance as ~50 GAE instances with a single dedicated host at 2-4 order of magnitude less cost.

AppScale itself is pretty interesting though, but without the Google Bigtable backend, most of the forced restrictions don't make much sense and actually decrease performance and reliability compared to just developing for a linux VM directly.

unz2• 13 years ago

Not to get argumentative, but I often come across people trashing app engine and I just don't get it. I think it's absolutely great and how software development should be done,

They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it can't be used.

And it's about as cheap as you could make something like that, If google itself finds it valuable, that's a argument in favor, not against, google having some of the best software developers around.

The only limitation currently is it doesn't have postgresql.

(I don't have anything to do with google. I just wish more people used it so more features could be added, and more open source software written for it, and I'd benefit from that).

dougk16• 13 years ago

Curious as to when you last tried out GAE. I've had a wonderful experience so far over the last 2 years. My instances never take longer than a few seconds to start up... in fact it's sometimes spooky how fast they do.

"...with very harsh restrictions and poor portability"

You can say the same about web development, but the real question is if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. As a one-man-band GAE is almost a necessity for me, allowing me to focus purely on code. As far as portability, I'm religious about wrapping any GAE-specific code/paradigms so I can hop onto EC2 or whatever pretty easily if I need to (actually did need to once). Certainly if I was leading a large team, we would explore more efficient and cost-effective options, but for me it's perfect.

There is also Google Compute Engine, which may mitigate the restrictions of GAE...haven't tried it myself yet though.

nlake444• 13 years ago

Their traction numbers seem pretty impressive with over 3 million active applications, which they announced at Google IO of this year. Last year, iirc, it was around 1 million apps.

timothya• 13 years ago

I wouldn't exactly say that AppEngine doesn't have much traction. Every month, half the world's IP addresses touch some service hosted on AppEngine[1], which is a pretty huge number.

[1]: And that statistic is more than a year old now (from 2012's Google I/O: http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/google-app-engine-by-the-number...), it's a higher number now.

valhallarecords• 13 years ago

SnapChat uses App Engine: http://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-build...

So does Khan Academy. Ben Kamens, their lead developers, writes a lot of great App Engine tips on his blog: http://bjk5.com/post/54202245691/the-app-engine-way

martin_• 13 years ago

Any plans to support PHP? It seems to be the only missing engine before being a complete clone

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/

nlake444• 13 years ago

Author of AppScale here. We have php support on our road map. I suspect its about one to two sprints out.

rbanffy4• 13 years ago

I submitted a presentation proposal about AppScale for this year's PythonBrasil (no word yet on whether it was approved). Is there anything in special I should highlight?

jagan123• 13 years ago

Appengine is already cheap and reliable. Why would anyone want it on other cloud providers?

nlake444• 13 years ago

I agree. The private case may be more appealing though. App developers might have some enterprise customers who want to run their applications behind a firewall.

sktrdie• 13 years ago

Because if they increase their prices, as they have done in the past already, you may still want the freedom of hosting your app somewhere else.

bitbitbit3• 13 years ago

Misleading statement. They did not "increase" the price so to speak. The platform came out of beta and into normal pricing mode. The low prices were introductory prices to get developers to use the platform.

dustingetz• 13 years ago

vendor lock-in, risk management, privacy of data

rbanffy4• 13 years ago

In addition to the others mentioned, regulatory issues come to mind. The company I work for hosts applications we are not allowed to host on servers we do not control.

nl• 13 years ago

To quote the question "Why would anyone want it on other cloud providers"

You can't use AppEngine or any other cloud provider, unless you start playing semantic games around what "servers we do not control" means.

jfoster• 13 years ago

Well, I'm happy with app engine so far, but it would be nice to have an insurance plan in case Google decide to do something which changes that. Possibilities include retiring app engine, changing the pricing significantly, introducing unpalatable restrictions, etc.

kazagistar• 13 years ago

For example, if your employer is a non-US government, and feels that feeding all your data directly to the NSA might be undesirable.

jis• 13 years ago

We host MIT App Inventor on Google App Engine. However we have some folks who want to use App Inventor in locations that have difficulty reaching GAE. Either because they are located on a poor internet connection, or don't have one at all!

crypto5• 13 years ago

For me, maintenance of large DBs can be very expensive. Some simple query like select count(*) from where ... can easily cost $10, and mysql will give you it for free.

moondowner• 13 years ago

Nice! A complete clone of GAE is really handy to be able to use in some cases.

Note that you can also run Java GAE apps on JBoss AS or OpenShift with CapeDwarf: https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf

jwheeler79• 13 years ago

AppScale are notorious for spamming the official GAE mailing list, and for that reason alone, I'd be cautious dealing with them

rbanffy4• 13 years ago

I'm looking at the google-appengine group and there are three messages with the word "appscale" in them since June. Am I looking into the wrong list?

newtexan• 13 years ago

I've been working on porting an existing python based AE project to AS and so far so good. My companies' reasoning for putting time and resources into AppScale is for redundancy. AE is a great platform to develop for however it's not a 5 9s platform that's for sure.

jaytaylor• 13 years ago

This looks very similar to the ShipBuilder PaaS written in Go (https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder). I am excited to see all these open source PaaS systems beginning to emerge and mature. These all help to foster and sustain an environment which makes creating and hosting large-scale applications easier for developers. A considerable and big win in the OSS world if you ask me!

richardw• 13 years ago

I'd love a no-fidget version of GAE, where the underlying infrastructure wasn't 'upgraded' constantly, or at least was done on a very careful schedule. A good portion of issue mails from Google are 'we upgraded something and broke these things. btw, we care about reliability.'

A project like this might encourage a hosting company to take that on. One disadvantage with Google is that your app can be affected by very many layers of goodness, including leaky abstractions that have nothing to do with GAE on the surface. Like when they blocked some Cloudflare somewhere down the stack and various Google sites were affected, including GAE and Blogger.

Open Source Google App Engine Clone

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