Google upgrades its cloud platform
InfoWorld - Google will upgrade on Thursday its Google App Engine cloud platform and its software development kit, adding capabilities for real-time communications and increased data replication. — The company will roll out Google App Engine 1.4.0 …
Context & Ripple Effects
App Engine has been on a commercialization path since Google's February 2009 announcement of paid pricing let developers scale past the original free quotas. Version 1.4.0 continues that arc: real-time communications and beefed-up data replication are features you buy when the platform is meant to host serious applications, not weekend experiments.
The timing matters because Google is pushing on the enterprise door from several directions at once — on the same day, the General Services Administration confirmed it is replacing IBM Lotus Notes and Domino with Google mail, giving the company a marquee government reference customer even as it deepens the developer platform.
First-order effects
- Developers on App Engine gain server-side real-time messaging and stronger data durability without provisioning their own infrastructure, making the platform viable for interactive and multi-user apps it previously handled poorly.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms — Amazon Web Services chief among them, along with Microsoft's Azure effort — face pressure to match managed real-time and replication features rather than compete only on raw compute and storage pricing.
Third-order effects
- If the upgrade cadence holds, App Engine keeps drifting from a free-quota developer sandbox toward a full commercial platform, sharpening the industry's emerging split between infrastructure-as-a-service commodity providers and opinionated platform vendors that bundle services.
The trend: Cloud platforms are beginning to compete on bundled managed services such as real-time messaging and replication rather than raw capacity alone — an early marker of PaaS maturing out of its sandbox phase.