Google wants your WordPress blog—and everything else—in its cloud (original) (raw)

The addition of PHP to App Engine could be bad news for many shared hosting services. Small PHP websites could be run virtually for free in Google’s cloud without service level agreements—the Cloud SQL backend, while free until June, could cost a few dollars a month for low-volume sites.

Google is also offering a limited preview of AppEngine Servers, a way of modularizing applications that allows them to share a data store or in-memory cache, while permitting the modules themselves to be partitioned, deployed individually, and managed by their own scaling and performance rules.

The Cloud is your hard drive

Cloud SQL isn’t the only database option that’s available outside App Engine in Google’s Cloud Platform. Today Google introduced Google Cloud Datastore, a new NoSQL, schema-less key-value pair database. Essentially a repackaging of Google’s High Replication Datastore available through App Engine, Google Cloud Datastore competes directly with Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Cloud Datastore can be connected to any application via an HTML interface, and is replicated across multiple Google data centers—ensuring high availability and guarding against data loss in the event of an outage at any given facility. Hölzle said that Cloud Datastore is based on BigTable, Google’s proprietary data store used as the storage back-end for Google Apps and many other Google services. “It currently serves 4.5 trillion transactions per month,” Hölzle said, “and now it can be used anywhere as a service.”

While Cloud Datastore supports atomic transactions, has high availability for data reads and writes, and supports SQL-like queries through Google’s GQL query language, it is similar to other highly distributed NoSQL data stores (like Amazon’s Dynamo and Hadoop) in that it has “eventual” consistency—that is, changes are eventually spread through replication. However, it can be tuned to provide ACID support—making it suitable for Web-based transactional systems.

Compute on demand

Much of the news centered on Google’s Compute Engine, a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 service launched at last year’s Google I/O. Previously restricted to a small set of Google partners, Compute Engine is now available to everyone. Along with that general availability, Google has introduced new “shared-core” instances of the Compute Engine virtual machine for developers and other small-volume users: “small” instances with 1.7 gigabytes of memory and “micro” instances with 0.6 GB.