What alternatives exist in the Google App Engine?

Question

What alternatives exist for GAE, given that I already have some good code that I would like to keep. In other words, I dig python. However, my use case is rather a small number of requests, a higher type of processor usage, and I worry that I cannot stay with App Engine forever. I have heard many people talking about Amazon web services and other types of cloud providers, but I can hardly see where most of these other offers provide a range of services (data request, user authentication, automatic scaling) that the Engine application provides. What are my options?

Answer 1

I don’t think there is another alternative (with respect to code portability) to GAE right now, since GAE is in its own class. Of course, GAE is cloud computing, but I see GAE as a subset of cloud computing. Amazon EC2 is also cloud computing (as well as Joyent Accelerators, Slicehost Slices), but obviously they are two different beasts. So now you are in a situation that requires a rethinking of your architecture, depending on your needs.

The immediate benefits of GAE are that it is essentially maintenance free, as it is infrastructure-related (scalable web server and database administration). GAE is more suited to those developers who want to focus only on their applications, and not on the underlying system. To some extent, you may consider the developer to be friendly. Now it should also be said that these other cloud computing solutions also allow you to only worry about your application as much as you need by providing VM images / templates. Ultimately, your needs will dictate the approach you must take.

Now, with all this in mind, we can also create hybrid solutions and workarounds that could also satisfy our needs. For example, GAE does not seem to be suitable for this particular application that you need to describe. In other words, GAE offers a relatively large number of requests, a low number of processor cycles (not sure if the paid version will be different).

However, one way to solve this problem is to create a custom solution that includes GAE as an external interface and Amazon AWS (EC2, S3 and SQS) as a backend. Some will say that you could also build your entire stack on AWS, but this may include rewriting a lot of existing code. In addition, as a workaround, the previous postoverflow post describes a method for simulating background tasks in GAE. Alternatively, you can look at HTTP Map / Reduce to distribute the workload.

Answer 2

Appscale

AppScale is a platform that allows users to deploy and host their own Google App Engine application apps. It automatically launches over Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus, as well as Xen and KVM. It was developed and maintained by AppScale Systems . It supports the Python, Go, PHP, and Java platforms of the Google App Engine.

http://github.com/AppScale/appscale

On average ...

... this is the 2015 amos, and it seems that containers are the way forward. Alternatives to GAE appear:

Google released Kubernetes , the container planning software they developed, manage GCE containers , but can also be used for other clusters.

There are several upcoming PaaS on Docker, such as

• http://deis.io/
• http://www.tsuru.io/
• even Appscale themselves support Docker

Interesting things to keep track of them.

Answer 3

Alternatives: 1. AppScale 2. Heroku .

Link: Alternative for Google AppEngine?

Answer 4

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 is a good option. Basically, you run Linux virtual machines on your servers, which you can control via the web interface (for turning it on and off) and, of course, access via SSH or something that you usually configure ... And since this is a linux installation which you control, you can of course run python if you want.

Answer 5

Microsoft Windows Azure may be worth a look. I'm afraid I have not used it, so I can’t say whether this is good, and you should keep in mind that this is CTP at the moment.

Check here.

Answer 6

A little late, but I would say Heroku:

Heroku is a cloud-based polyglot application platform. With Geroku you do not need to think about servers at all. You can write applications using modern development methods in the programming language of your choice, return it with additional resources, such as SQL and NoSQL databases, Memcached and many others. You control your application using the Heroku command line tool, and you deploy the code using the Git version control element, all run on the Heroku infrastructure.

https://www.heroku.com/about

Answer 7

In 2016. If you want to combine PaaS (platform as a service) and FaaS (function as a service) in the same serverless computing category, then you have several FaaS options.

Personally, I would seriously avoid irreversible blocking with a proprietary provider, for the simple reason that your transaction costs can be much higher over time than a competing supplier.

Own

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda lets you run code without providing or managing servers. You pay only for the computation time that you consume - there is no fee if your code does not work. With Lambda, you can run code for almost any type of application or backend service — all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda will take care of everything you need to run and scale your highly available code. You can configure your code to start automatically from other AWS services or call it directly from any web application or mobile application.

AWS stepping features complement AWS Lambda.

AWS step-by-step features simplify the coordination of distributed application components and microservices using visual workflows. Creating applications from individual components, each of which performs a discrete function, allows you to quickly scale and modify applications. Step functions are a reliable way to coordinate components and perform the functions of your application. The Step functions provide a graphical console for organizing and visualizing the components of your application as a series of steps. This makes it easy to create and run multi-step applications. The step-by-step functions automatically start and track each step and repeat when errors occur, so your application runs in order and as expected. Step functions record the status of each step, so when something goes wrong, you can quickly diagnose and debug problems. You can change and add steps without writing code.

Google Cloud Functions

As of November 2016, it is in alpha.

Google Cloud Functions is a lightweight, event-based, asynchronous computing solution that allows you to create small, single-purpose functions that respond to cloud events without the need for server or runtime management. Events from Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud Pub / Sub can trigger cloud functions asynchronously, or you can use an HTTP call to execute synchronously.

Azure Features

Uncompromising, event-driven experience to accelerate your development. It can scale based on demand, and you only pay for the resources you consume.

Open

Serverless

The serverless platform allows you to deploy automatic scaling, pay-per-execution, event-driven features for any cloud. We currently support Amazon Web Service Lambda and are expanding to support other cloud providers.

Ironfunctions

IronFunctions is an open-source tubeless computing platform for any cloud - private, public or hybrid.

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It remains to be seen how well FaaS competes with CaaS (container as a service). The first seems easier. Both are suitable for microservice architectures.

I expect that the functions (as in FaaS) are not the end of the line, and that in many years we will see further service abstractions, for example. for testing only, and then open language scripts.

Answer 8

If you are interested in the cloud and perhaps want to create your own for production and / or testing, you should check out Eucalyptus . It is assumed that the code is compatible with EC2, but open source.

Answer 9

You can also take a look at AWS Elastic Beanstock - it has a closer equivalence of GAE functionality, as it is intended to be PaaS, rather than IaaS (i.e. EC2)

Answer 10

I would be more interested in how App Engine can be easily connected to another server used for requests with an intensive processor.

Answer 11

TyphoonAE is trying to do this. I have not tested it, but while it is still in beta, it looks as usual in active development.

Answer 12

The transition to cloud computing is so fast that you do not have time to spend time testing different platforms. I suggest you try Jelastic if you are also interested in Java.

One of the biggest things about Jelastic is that you don’t need to make any changes to your application code other than changes to the functionality of your application, but not for the reason that it requires the chosen platform. In this regard, you actually do not waste your time. The deployment process is simply flawless, and you can deploy your .war file anywhere further. Using GAE requires you to modify the application around your system needs. If you have to work with Java and start looking for a more flexible platform, Jelastic is a compatible alternative.

Answer 13

You can also use the Red Hat Cape Dwarf project to run GAE applications on top of the Wildfly apps (formerly JBoss) applications without changes.

You can check it out here:

http://capedwarf.org/