Google App Engine - what about existing applications?

Recently, Google announced Google App Engine, another announcement in the rapidly growing world of cloud computing. This brings up some very serious questions:

1. If we want to take advantage of one of the clouds, are we doomed to be locked-in for life?
2. Must we re-write our existing applications to use the cloud?
3. Do we need to learn a brand new technology or language for the cloud?

This post presents a pattern that will enable us to abstract our application code from the underlying cloud provider infrastructure. This will enable us to easily migrate our EXISTING applications to cloud based environment thus avoiding the need for a complete re-write.

Comments

[webmogul]

Google and Amazon are completely different animals. With amazon you get a VM of your choosing and can do anything you want to it. Now if you are referring to SimpleDB, S3, etc. then simple code design can abstract those out (as I am doing with a new project). Google App only allows you to play in their app cloudspace and use their db, storage, etc. and thus if far more strict.

I think Google tried to go straight to the app layer instead of going bottom up like Amazon did. If they had they would probably get a lot more business. You would think it would be far easier to open up some VM space and maybe BigTable to compete with EC2 and S3. I know I would love to see it.

[farhaj]

Google is leading as always and is ready to compete with his comptitors...
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