Google opened its annual developer confab, Google I/O, with a few moves aimed at demonstrating its enterprise chops, including a new version of the search giant's developer hosting platform -- Google App Engine -- and a partnership with VMware to help bring enterprise Java developers to the cloud.
Google opened its annual developer confab,
Google I/O, with a few moves
aimed at demonstrating its enterprise chops, including a new version of the
search giant's developer hosting platform and a partnership with VMware to help
bring enterprise Java developers to the cloud.
At the opening of its Google I/O developer conference in San
Francisco on May 19, Google announced a new version of
the
Google App Engine, Google
App Engine for Business.
In a blog post on the Google site, Vic Gundotra, vice president of
engineering at Google, said:
"Today we're announcing Google App Engine for Business, which offers
new features that enable companies to build internal applications on the same
reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure that we at Google use for our own
apps. For greater cloud portability, we're also teaming up with VMware to make
it easier for companies to build rich web apps and deploy them to the cloud of
their choice or on-premise. In just one click, users of the new versions of
SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application to
Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment or other infrastructure,
such as Amazon EC2."
Google App Engine for Business enables enterprise organizations to build and
maintain their own applications on the same scalable infrastructure that powers
Google applications, with added management and support features tailored
specifically for the enterprise. New capabilities for businesses include the
ability to manage all the apps in an organization from one place, simple
pricing based on users and applications, premium developer support, a 99.9
percent uptime service-level agreement (SLA), and, coming later this year,
access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL.
During the May 18 Google I/O keynote, Kevin Gibbs, technical lead and
manager of the Google App Engine project, said one of the most common concerns
for enterprise Web developers is "managing all the apps at your
company." So Google looked at its Google App Engine hosting platform as a
way to address this, but realized it needed to shore it up to support
enterprises.
"Google App Engine for Business is built from the ground up around
solving the problems that enterprises face," Gibbs said.
In a briefing with eWEEK, Eric Tholome, product management director for
developer technology at Google, said Google App Engine for Business allows
developers to use standards-based technology, such as Java, Python, the Eclipse
IDE and Google Web Toolkit (GWT), to create
applications that run on the platform. It also offers users dynamic scaling,
consistent availability and flat-rate pricing.
Gibbs said Google will be delivering the features in Google App Engine for
Business throughout the rest of this year What Google announced at the
show was a preview of the platform, which includes an Enterprise Administration
Console, a company-focused console that allows you to see, manage and set
security policies for all applications in your domain. Other features such as
support, the SLA, billing, hosted SQL and custom domain SSL
will come later, according to the
company's road map.
Pricing for Google App Engine for Business will be $8 a month for each user
for each application, up to a maximum of $1,000 per application per month,
Gibbs said.
Meanwhile, Google announced a series of technology collaborations with
VMware to deliver solutions that make enterprise software developers more
efficient at building, deploying and managing applications within any cloud
environment: public, private and hybrid.
"Companies are actively looking to move toward cloud computing," said
Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware.
"They are certainly attracted by the economic advantages associated with
cloud, but increasingly are focused on the business agility and innovation
promised by cloud computing. VMware and Google are aligning to reassure our
mutual customers and the Java community that choice and portability are of
utmost importance to both companies. We will work to ensure that modern
applications can run smoothly within the firewalls of a company's data center
or out in the public cloud environment."
The move for Google is to gain more traction in the enterprise, with
enterprise Java developers using the popular Spring Framework, which comes out
of VMware's SpringSource division. VMware recently did a similar partnership
with Salesforce.com in this regard.
"More than half of the new lines of Java code written are written in
the context of Spring," Maritz said addressing the audience at Google I/O.
"We're providing the back end to add to what Google provides on the front
end. We have integrated the Spring Framework with Google Web Toolkit to offer
an end-to-end environment."
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