Comments on: Enter the cloud – but how deep?

By: Arnþór Snær

Arnþór Snær — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:42:31 +0000

Came by this post along the same lines and thought it would be relevant to link it up here: ongoing - Get In The Cloud

By: SVK

SVK — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:15:48 +0000

IMHO, there is one more interesting way to portability: to create a high-level DSL and express the needed business logic, etc. using that DSL. In this case transfer to another platform will require only reworking appropriate language implementation which often forms relatively thin layer under the rest of the project functionality. With proper DSL, it is even possible to switch from one platform-specific language to another.

In addition to portability, using DSLs have other attractive features, such as increase in productivity or ability of automated code analysis for parallelism, etc.

Here is an example of using DSL approach to some real-world problems:

http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.ps.gz

DSLs are also have their risks, of course. The main of them is that DSL designer should choose the correct set of primitives to aviod “abstraction leakage” as long as possible.

By: Hjalmar Gislason

Hjalmar Gislason — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:40:17 +0000

Sveinn: I think Force.com makes sense if what you’re trying to do is closely connected with things in SalesForce, but not as a general platform.

Focusing on core competitive advantage and “leaving the rest to the best” is a great way to explain DataMarket’s team/partner strategy. Even better than anything I’d come up with myself.

By: Sveinn Tryggvason

Sveinn Tryggvason — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:48:02 +0000

Like so many times before you’re spot-on, Hjalli. At least I hope you are because I agree with you – in particular about Google and AWS. I’m somewhat more skeptical about force.com since they seem to be on a semi-proprietary island.
Congrats about the Newco and the ultra-focused attitude and leaving the rest to the best (maybe I should get that registered if it’s not taken). We already miss you at the Mothership.

By: Kjartan Sverrisson

Kjartan Sverrisson — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:38:22 +0000

Choosing the correct platform is always a matter of weighing out the pro’s and con’s. In my case the Django framework and other available Python libraries do the trick

Betting on Java is in my mind a pretty sure bet as the language is mostly platform independent one that is likely to be supported by more clouds in the future, easing the fears lock-in and other platform provider issues. I think you’re on the right track with Datamarket.

By: hjalli

hjalli — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:29:12 +0000

Thanks for the pointers guys.

Don’t get me wrong, AppEngine is cool and considering the new info you point to, the actual lock-in may not be as bad as I thought. The AppEngine-on-EC2 is however still a hack, and as such, its future compatibility is clearly not a given.

In my particular case I’ve found libraries for Java that are likely to save DataMarket years of work and not been able to find similar things for Python. So, the freedom to select technologies that comes with IaaS in my case trumps the benefits of available PaaS offerings (mainly “effortless” scalability).

Nevertheless: for many web applications, especially those that can benefit from hooking up with Google services or using the assets Google makes available via the APIs, AppEngine is a great platform and one to seriously consider.

By: Kjartan Sverrisson

Kjartan Sverrisson — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:15:15 +0000

I’ve been looking into cloud computing for a customer of mine, specifically Google AppEngine and like what I see so far.

I have to admit that I haven’t gone deep into other clouds so far, but the scalability and ease of use of the Google AppEngine impresses me alot.

As Bjarni Rúnar points out the the data lock-in concerns are being addressed (in a way) and it is possible to run the environment (using a hack) in another cloud, making it very flexible as a PaaS.

Anyway, I’m excited to hear more about Datamarket

By: Bjarni Rúnar

Bjarni Rúnar — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:13:39 +0000

Heh, I should have read the whole article I linked before posting. It reports that the Appengine SDK is already open source and that Google is addressing your data lock-in concerns. So yeah. I like what my employer is doing in this space!

By: Bjarni Rúnar

Bjarni Rúnar — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:10:02 +0000

(Disclaimer: I work for Google one one of the teams running the “infrastructure” underlying, amongst other things, Appengine)

Regarding portability, I’m pretty sure people have gotten the Appengine development environment to run on 3rd party servers, essentially allowing you to host your Appengine apps yourself.

In fact, here’s an article about running Appengine apps on Amazon’s EC3: http://waxy.org/2008/04/exclusive_google_app_engine_ported_to_amazons_ec2/

It’s hack, but it arguably makes Appengine the only platform you can develop for which already has two live clouds that can run your apps.

I don’t know if Google plans to open source the SDK or not, but even if they don’t odds are an open-source implementation of the stack will materialize sooner than later.

So… I suspect you may be over-estimating the degree of actual lock-in. Appengine is cool.

By: Arni Hermann

Arni Hermann — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:51:48 +0000

Excellent post, looking forward to see where you’re heading with DataMarket

You mentioned SimpleDB and abstraction layers, it so happens to be that someone implemented JPA for SimpleDB, I think it was called SimpleJPA — which implemented a subset of the JPA query standard — something that might make you feel more platform neutral Don’t know how far along/stable/reliable/… it is though.