Strategy
Small Imrovements, makers of a hosted, lightweight feedback platform, have written an excellent article on Performance issues on GAE, and how we resolved them. They show how they trimmed most of their requests to between 300ms and 800ms, some still take 2 seconds when memcache is stale, and others clock
GAE
With the Google IO Developer Conference completed there are dozens and dozens of information packed videos now available. While you won't get any of the nifty free swag the attendees rake in, it's great of Google to make these videos available so quickly after the conference.
Paper
A giant step into the fully distributed future has been taken by the Google App Engine team with the release of their High Replication Datastore. The HRD is targeted at mission critical applications that require data replicated to at least three datacenters, full ACID semantics for entity groups, and lower
Strategy
We can all learn from problems. The Google App Engine team has created a teachable moment through a remarkably honest and forthcoming post-mortem for February 24th, 2010 outage post, chronicling in elaborate detail a power outage that took down Google App Engine for a few hours. The world is ending!
Example
How do you scale a viral Facebook app that has skyrocketed to a mind boggling 65 million installs (the population of France)? That's the fortunate problem BuddyPoke co-founder Dave Westwood has and he talked about his solution at Wednesday's Facebook Meetup. Slides for the complete talk
Java
Google App Engine (GAE) is focused on making development easy, but limits your options. Amazon Web Services is focused on making development flexible, but complicates the development process. Real enterprise applications require both of these paradigms to achieve success… What we really want is the flexibility of AWS and the
Strategy
Update 6: CARS = Cost Aware Runtimes and Services by William Louth. Update 5: Damn You Google, Damn You Yahoo! Why D'Ya Do This to Us? Free accounts on a cloud platform are a constant drain of money. Update 4: Caching becomes even more important in CPU based billing
Python
Update 6:: Back to the Future for Data Storage. We are in the middle of a renaissance in data storage with the application of many new ideas and techniques; there's huge potential for breaking out of thinking about data storage in just one way. Update 5: Building Scalable
AWS
Why isn't Google's aggressive new database pricing strategy getting more pub? That's what Bill Katz, instigator of the GAE Meetup and prize winning science fiction author is wondering: It's surprising that the blogosphere hasn't picked up the biggest difference in
Strategy
Update 3: ReadWriteWeb says Google App Engine Announces New Pricing Plans, APIs, Open Access. Pricing is specified but I'm not sure what to make of it yet. An image manipulation library is added (thus the need to pay for more CPU :-) and memcached support has been added.
GAE
Over the years I've accumulated quite a rag tag collection of personal systems scattered wide across a galaxy of different servers. For the past month I've been on a quest to rationalize this conglomeration by moving everything to a managed service of one kind or another.
Python
I haven't developed an AppEngine application yet, I'm just taking a look around their documentation and seeing what stands out for me. It's not the much speculated super cluster VM. AppEngine is solidly grounded in code and structure. It reminds me a little of