Google is apparently on the verge of unveiling some sort of cloud service that lets software developers do things they can't do with Google App Engine. But App Engine is evolving too.
On Tuesday evening, just before its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Google released a new software developer kit, or SDK, for App Engine, a service that lets you build and host applications atop the company's famously agile online infrastructure. Among other things, the new SDK lets you encrypt traffic to and from your applications using the secure socket layer protocol, or SSL, the standard means of encryption on the web.
Google, for instance, uses SSL to encrypt traffic on many of its own web services. But this is the first time the company has offered such encryption to those building applications atop App Engine. "Lack of custom SSL was the main issue preventing me from considering App Engine for my web service, so I'll definitely have to revisit it to see how it could compare to AWS in production," said one commenter on the popular developer discussion site Hacker News, referring to Amazon Web Services, by far the world's most popular service for building and hosting applications online.
AWS is a very different animal. Unlike Google App Engine -- which handles all the raw computing resources under the proverbial covers and limits what software you can run -- AWS offers up raw virtual servers where you can run almost anything. Because of this flexibility -- and because it was first on the scene -- Amazon's service now runs an estimated one percent of the internet. But Google is determined to make up lost ground.
Even as it beefs up App Engine this week, Google is expected to reveal a new service that looks more like Amazon. It appears that this new service operates separately from App Engine, but on Wednesday afternoon at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Greg D’alesandre, who oversees App Engine, declined to comment on the matter.
In addition to SSL encryption, the new App Engine SDK -- version 1.7.0 -- also lets paying customers create applications that can be served from data center in the European Union, not just the U.S., and it lets you plug applications into Google's PageSpeed service, a means of speeding the delivery of content over the web.
D’alesandre said that many existing App Engine customers have asked for serving directly from European data centers, and he pointed out that the new SDK also includes what Google calls "Cloud Endpoints," a service that's meant to facilitate the development of applications that are used on mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone.
The PageSpeed service, SSL encryption, and other services require additional fees. App Engine's basic service is free, but you must pay fees once your application reaches service usage thresholds or if you use certain premium services.
