Fun post! I lived through a bit of anecdotal evidence that confirms this: co-founding Google App Engine.
We started it in winter 2005, before AWS or almost any other cloud platform launched. The term "cloud" hadn't even been coined yet. Our inspirations were the make-your-own-social-network platform Ning, shared CGI hosts like Dreamforce, and Salesforce's Force.com, a limited multitenant Java host that was still years ahead of its time.
AWS managed to launch a bit ahead of us, as an a la carte IaaS with VMs, file storage, and task queues. App Engine was a serverless PaaS with built in NoSQL datastore, in memory cache, user accounts, email, and lots more.
Regardless, growth was...slow. We were *very* different from the status quo, so enterprises wouldn't touch us, and we had no good migration path for existing apps, so our early users were mainly hobbyists and new companies that started on us from from scratch. Snapchat and Khan Academy are two well known examples. Thank God Google's management didn't expect anything of us; if we were a startup with angel investors breathing down our necks to hit growth numbers, who knows what would have happened.
Even so, you know the rest of the story. GAE blazed much of the early trail to serverless. It currently has a >$1B run rate and led to Google Cloud, the third largest cloud computing platform in the world. And it was a hell of a lot of fun to build. Too bad we didn't do it as a startup. It probably wouldn't hae survived, but if it did, it might have been a unicorn.
Wow, nice of you to chime in here, Ryan, and I'm glad you liked the post.
I was at Google when App Engine launched, and it was amazing to build a backend in 45 minutes, and get things like scalabiliy and multiple versions (1.myapp.appspot.com and 2.myapp.appspot.com) for free.
I followed the GAE story at Google and the hopes behind it, and that it's a different take on the cloud as compred to AWS. Unfortunately it didn't work out, but I'll have a soft spot for it.
What's the closest that comes to GAE today? I know GAE is still around but it may be spring-cleaned... Or is it still safe to use GAE for a new service today?
Thanks for the kind words! GAE is still alive and kicking, well supported and used, and was historically one of the big GCP revenue drivers. GCP also has a very strong deprecation commitment for core products like GAE, iirc they have to give 3y advance notice (!) before decommissioning...which I doubt they'd do any time soon, but they have pulled out all the component APIs into their own services, which are still usable from GAE, but not quite as seamlessly.
More broadly, the serverless movement overall has obviously flourished, including GAE-style all-in-one platforms like Heroku, Zeit, Firebase, and many others. That's been great to see!
Fun post! I lived through a bit of anecdotal evidence that confirms this: co-founding Google App Engine.
We started it in winter 2005, before AWS or almost any other cloud platform launched. The term "cloud" hadn't even been coined yet. Our inspirations were the make-your-own-social-network platform Ning, shared CGI hosts like Dreamforce, and Salesforce's Force.com, a limited multitenant Java host that was still years ahead of its time.
AWS managed to launch a bit ahead of us, as an a la carte IaaS with VMs, file storage, and task queues. App Engine was a serverless PaaS with built in NoSQL datastore, in memory cache, user accounts, email, and lots more.
Regardless, growth was...slow. We were *very* different from the status quo, so enterprises wouldn't touch us, and we had no good migration path for existing apps, so our early users were mainly hobbyists and new companies that started on us from from scratch. Snapchat and Khan Academy are two well known examples. Thank God Google's management didn't expect anything of us; if we were a startup with angel investors breathing down our necks to hit growth numbers, who knows what would have happened.
Even so, you know the rest of the story. GAE blazed much of the early trail to serverless. It currently has a >$1B run rate and led to Google Cloud, the third largest cloud computing platform in the world. And it was a hell of a lot of fun to build. Too bad we didn't do it as a startup. It probably wouldn't hae survived, but if it did, it might have been a unicorn.
Wow, nice of you to chime in here, Ryan, and I'm glad you liked the post.
I was at Google when App Engine launched, and it was amazing to build a backend in 45 minutes, and get things like scalabiliy and multiple versions (1.myapp.appspot.com and 2.myapp.appspot.com) for free.
I followed the GAE story at Google and the hopes behind it, and that it's a different take on the cloud as compred to AWS. Unfortunately it didn't work out, but I'll have a soft spot for it.
What's the closest that comes to GAE today? I know GAE is still around but it may be spring-cleaned... Or is it still safe to use GAE for a new service today?
Thanks for the kind words! GAE is still alive and kicking, well supported and used, and was historically one of the big GCP revenue drivers. GCP also has a very strong deprecation commitment for core products like GAE, iirc they have to give 3y advance notice (!) before decommissioning...which I doubt they'd do any time soon, but they have pulled out all the component APIs into their own services, which are still usable from GAE, but not quite as seamlessly.
More broadly, the serverless movement overall has obviously flourished, including GAE-style all-in-one platforms like Heroku, Zeit, Firebase, and many others. That's been great to see!