Portable Cloud Computing, Google AppEngine

I will club the other articles for this class together as they touch upon the same theme. 

Two commercial options for using the cloud are available now – Amazon’s S3/EC2 and Google’s AppEngine. The former sort of provides just the machines and resources, and lets the user do whatever he wants. The latter is a more structured approach and allows users a set of APIs to use the cloud facilities (like Google Query Language (GQL) to access the datastore etc. and host applications). While the AppEngine is particularly attractive because it automatically gives applications access to all the nice scalability features, there is a warning that this has the potential to tie applications to the Google API for using clouds. For example, you cannot take an EC2 service and run it on AppEngine, while the reverse is true. While the AppDrop does help in porting AppEngine applications to run flawlessly on EC2, it comes at the cost of scalability. True, someone can still hack in and provide all the database and scalability support, but this is an ugly and potentially dangerous way to move forward. 

This calls for the community to take stock of the situation and push towards a standard and open cloud API, with open source implementations. If you are looking for an inspirational model, there is always LAMP! :-)