{"id":570909,"date":"2010-05-19T13:00:55","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=120996"},"modified":"2010-05-19T13:00:55","modified_gmt":"2010-05-19T17:00:55","slug":"google-tries-to-offer-a-grown-up-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/570909","title":{"rendered":"Google Tries to Offer a Grown-up Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> Google has tweaked its App Engine platform as a service to make it palatable for business customers, the search giant said today at its developer conference in San Francisco. Its goal is to get corporations to build their in-house software on App Engine for Business as opposed to hosting it in their own data centers or on another cloud. But while App Engine for Business is a logical next step for Google, it still has a ways to go when it comes to providing a truly competitive PaaS that developers will use to build enterprise applications.<\/p>\n

App Engine for Business corrects certain issues that bother developers about App Engine, namely by providing “enterprise-level support” (in other words, trouble tickets and subsequent responses) and SQL database capability (due by the third quarter).
\nGoogle’s Use of Big Table had also frustrated them as it locked them into the App Engine platform. Google’s response was that it knew how to build a scalable infrastructure, and so if you wanted to scale your app, then App Engine and the Big Table limits were the way to go.<\/p>\n

To be fair, App Engine was designed to attract developers trying to build consumer web services, and Google last May integrated App Engine with Salesforce.com<\/a> so business application developers could test it out. However, App Engine competes with services like Microsoft’s Azure, Heroku<\/a> and the recently announced VMforce platform<\/a> (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) from VMware and Salesforce.com. And so far Google does well at providing web-based apps to folks interested in breaking out of an Office-dominated world (and the office), but less so when it comes to providing flexibility and the higher levels of services<\/a> that those building their own enterprise apps in the cloud require.
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Perhaps because of its previous weakness at providing the service and an enterprise-friendly platform<\/a>, Google has worked with VMware’s Spring Source division<\/a> to develop a way to move apps from one cloud to another based on Spring’s Java framework. Oftentimes, it’s the weaker companies that work hardest to force interoperability and choice for customers, seeking an advantage.<\/p>\n