Cloud Computing boot camp
on the Google App Engine
by Matthew McCullough of Ambient Ideas, LLC

http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com/us/US/Shop/

➊

1960

circa 2 0 0 0

What is the Cloud?

Scalable

Dynamic

Pay-per-use

Stateless

Affinity-less

Scale up

Scale down

Grid

Why the Cloud?

Cost of startup

Experimentation

Transition to
Production

No licensing fees

Instant Availability

What’s the most
expensive item on a
startup’s balance sheet?

You!

Server setup

Server destruction

Time savings

Developer &
Consultant Time

Cloud Players

Google App Engine

Rackspace Mosso

Mor.ph

Amazon EC2

Levels of
Abstraction

Any language?

Ruby?

Java?

PHP?

Python?

Anything?

OS Images

or Predetermined

or Abstracted

File Systems

Mor.ph
Traditional File System

Amazon EC2
S3 Buckets

Amazon EC2
Elastic Block Storage

Rackspace Mosso
Traditional File System

Google App Engine
N/A

Databases

Amazon EC2
Simple DB

Amazon EC2
IBM DB2

Google App Engine
Big Table

Mor.ph
PostgreSQL

Mor.ph
MySQL

Mosso
MySQL

Mosso
Microsoft SQL Server

Mosso
<any db>

Operating
Systems

Windows Server
on Amazon EC2

1000 variants of Linux
on Amazon EC2

CentOS Linux
on Mor.ph

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu
on Mosso

<obfuscated>
on Google App Engine

Pricing

Amazon EC2

Mosso

Mor.ph

$1500/month

Mor.ph
Free human inside
specially marked boxes!

Google App Engine

Google App Engine
We’ll give it away free and
make it up in volume!

➋

App Engine
Google

2008
April 8th,

small company

Python!

2009
April 7th,

Java!

But more like

⅘
Java!

Getting Started with
GAE

Free to start

Cell Phone #

Regular Google
Account

10,000 first wave

obsessed

95 minutes

25,000 second wave

Ideas & Demos

Mobile Apps

Technology Stack

Servlet API

Jetty

JSPs

Java Mail API

Google Web Toolkit

Authentication

Integration with
Google Accounts

Admin & User Level
Permissions

Java Cache API

JSR-107 / JCache

BigTable

Database

Can import from
existing DB

JDO

JPA

No

No Gorm

No Hibernate

No file writing

No threads

lack of server affinity

Who moved my
cheese?

Even for sequential
requests

No sockets

But... can use URLFetch
for HTTP/HTTPS resources

No JNI

No more than 30s

Ouch!

Custom timeout
response

Application ID

Globally Unique

required for
deployment

xxxxx.appspot.com

SDK

Shell scripts to manage
apps

Source code included

Versioned by the JARs
you include

DataNucleus

JDO for BigTable

Subset of JDK 1.6

Custom Class Loaders

“Sandbox”

Whitelist of Classes

Caution!

Can work on desktop,
not on GAE

Compression

gzip

Accept-Encoding:gzip

Admin Console

Statistics

Graphs of Usage

System Health

Pay for
extreme usage

Daily Budget

Budget
per resource type

Logging

java.util.logging

System.out == info
System.err == warning

Log4j

Dev Tools

Eclipse

Jetty Demo Container

Bundled with
GWT plugin

Ant

Maven

➌

Ecosphere

Hyperic

Yup, those guys

CloudStatus.com

Mor.ph

Layer on top of EC2

Humans

Eclectic Info

Amazon Mechanical
Turk

Amazon
Elastic Map Reduce
Apache Hadoop

Cloud Fallout

Large Setups more
economical to self-host

Out of your hands

Uptime?

Do you trust the
vendor?

Persistence can be
weird

Give it a try!

Resources
• http://mor.ph
• http://appengine.google.com
• http://mosso.com
• http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/