
Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP - zafirk
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/05/ushering-in-next-generation-of.html
======
PaulMest
I see a lot of people on here wondering why Google would just now add support
to PHP. I don't work for Google, but I used to work at Microsoft. When Azure
launched it tried to "leapfrog" the other cloud vendors by offering only
Platform as a Service (PaaS). It offered superior benefits like high-
reliability and geographic redundancy. Though, that was met with limited
adoption. Why? Well, one of the major reasons was because it would require
developers to write new apps or rewrite their existing apps from the ground up
very specific to how Azure wants you to write it. This takes a lot of effort
from a very specialized skillset, thus very expensive. Also, since you're
writing it for the Azure platform, should you decide to switch to another
provider, you'd have to rewrite your app again! What if you had a bad
experience with customer support or billing? You'd basically be stuck. So
Azure has since started offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options,
which has far lower switching costs. This has had much greater traction and
builds an ongoing relationship with customers. The customers become more
familiar with the Azure platform and support offerings. If they feel good
about their IaaS experience, they will consider learning some of the premium
features and leverage them when they update their existing apps.

I think adding PHP is a strategically smart move by Google to get more people
using their cloud platform. Soon there will be new billing relationships
signed off by thousands of businesses to host basic apps and WordPress
installations. Assuming customers have positive initial experiences with
Google's PHP hosting, it will become easier for Google to upsell those
businesses to add premium cloud features for more advanced applications over
the coming years.

~~~
sneak
In related news, Google also just dropped Drive pricing to exactly 50% that of
Dropbox. Looks like they're trying to monetize all that huge capacity they
have floating around.

It's about time AWS had some serious competition.

~~~
tkw8
In related news Amazon Cloud Drive still costs less per GB than Google Drive.
AWS is also years ahead of GCE in terms of features and customer support and
has been dropping prices regularly for years. GCE doesn't bring anything new
that Rackspace, Azure, HP, Oracle etc. aren't already providing. GCE is likely
to be as effective against AWS as Google+ was against Facebook...

------
yogo
LOL at adding PHP support to app engine almost 5 years later. PHP gets a lot
of bashing but you can't deny its popularity, as evidenced by the number of
stars.

[https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...](https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=13&colspec=ID%20Type%20Component%20Status%20Stars%20Summary%20Language%20Priority%20Owner%20Log)

~~~
astrodust
PHP is only popular because many hosting providers support it.

Many hosting providers only support it because it's popular.

At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself
factor in.

~~~
iguana
PHP is popular because it's incredibly easy to get started for someone used to
doing things with HTML. An HTML page can be renamed to .php, and that is a
valid PHP page. For someone trying to go from HTML/CSS to the server side, PHP
presents the path of least resistance.

When using PHP, a lot of the basic data structure transforms are implemented
in the core language. You can integrate simple server side functionality into
a static HTML page in just a few minutes, and it will work on 99%+ of hosting
providers, and requires no fees and no tools.

For pedantic hackers like us, sure, it's garbage, but for the average person
that just wants to get things done, it is pure gold.

Also, WordPress, while the biggest POS in almost every possible way, has a
vast community of users, designers, plugin makers, and a marketplace for
various extensions and themes.

Google just opened up a huge chunk of the web app / CMS market.

~~~
pestaa
You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, _it is
computer science_. A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not
start off with PHP to build anything at all.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.

~~~
Legion
pestaa's comment needs to be amended. It should read: "A sane engineer with a
little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all
_in 2013_."

Facebook's former CTO has said that the only reason Facebook is still on PHP
still today is legacy. It wouldn't be written in PHP if it were started today.

PHP once was the right tool for the job, but those years have passed. We have
many better options now.

~~~
vidarh
We have many _technically cleaner_ solutions, but in the real world other
factors, such as ability to quickly hire sufficient number of reasonably
priced developers, often means a lot more than technical purity.

A sane engineer considers the full pictures before picking a solution rather
than pick their pet languages just because it's nice and clean.

------
fletchowns
Given Google's reputation of awful customer support, why would anybody want to
locked into their platform, especially when you have to do so many things the
"app engine" way?

~~~
nostrademons
You can run Django on top of AppEngine and port your app to any number of
Django hosts with minimal changes. I just talked to a startup founder who
started out on AppEngine and just recently switched to Heroku.

~~~
landr0id
Did you happen to ask why they decided to move from AppEngine to Heroku?

~~~
nostrademons
Didn't offhand - I just saw him in the hallway for 5 minutes or so while he
was in town for I/O.

------
tmzt
I recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different
philosophy from how I would approach it.

I see PHP as a growing and evolving object-oriented programming language. I
see it as a language to which design patterns can be applied, for which
structured designs can be applied, and which has improved which each major
release.

I also am keenly aware that it has a legacy and a reputation of being
something else, a rapid prototyping environment for programmers that don't
have exposure to other systems, and take it as a glorified template language
for HTML.

But I don't see it that way, I look at projects like <http://reactphp.org/>
which brings Node.js-style evented programming, native support for ZMQ and
websocket, and makes PHP a great language for developing web workers. (Though
with some caveats, for instance, I use PHP for my own application because it's
dependent on the cpanel xmlapi which is provided in PHP). But that really is
my point, you can abstract PHP from it's humble web roots and be a productive
programmer in it.

------
manacit
It looks like they have preemptively documented how to install Wordpress:
<https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress>

I wonder how the performance is -- will they support common cache plugins? If
not, I wonder if stock wordpress on GAE will be able to withstand getting
frontpage'd on HN/Reddit

Edit: Unfortunately, as there is no CloudSQL free tier, there's no way to test
it out without paying a small amount.

~~~
ajessup
AJ here, a PM on App Engine (and the guy who wrote the tutorial). The Batcache
plugin (which caches to Memcache) works on GAE out of the box, and gives a
predictable improvement to performance, especially when you've got a lot of
DB-heavy plugins.

~~~
jsdalton
That's a nice tutorial and the idea of running Wordpress on GAE is intriguing
to say the least.

I apologize that I have not closely familiarized myself with Google Cloud SQL.
Is it really API compatible with MySQL, or are there limitation that one is
bound to run into when one starts adding plugins etc.?

I also don't quite understand (not having tried it out yet, obviously) how
you'll handle static files (images, etc.) uploaded via the Wordpress "media"
feature. Is GAE able to support that?

Anyhow, congratulations on the launch. I'm not a huge fan of PHP myself but I
frequently find myself having to use it (e.g. to host a Wordpress site!) so
this is really an interesting avenue for me to explore.

~~~
ajessup
Google Cloud storage is a great place for uploaded media (it's pretty
efficient at serving), and the PHP runtime integrates quite cleanly into GCS
(you can fwrite() to a GCS object, for example).

[https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/googlestora...](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/googlestorage/overview)

We're working with a couple of Wordpress developers on a plugin to integrate
Wordpress media uploads with Google Cloud Storage.

------
salimmadjd
PHP??? I would have thought javascript or Ruby would have made more sense.It
seems like Google is just reacting to requests from 4 years ago.

The App Engine has mades some decisions that seem to be contradictory. At one
end, they drastically increased their prices and sent a signal the GAE was an
enterprise-focused platform. Now, they're releasing PHP so people can host
blogs on it. Really? You want to compete with $5-6/month wordpress hosting
solutions. Who is running the show there?

~~~
bradleyjg
It was the single most requested feature on the bug tracker by quite a bit.

It's not something I want, but apparently there are quite a few people who do.

~~~
salimmadjd
Is this cumulative requests from the past 5 years?

Also what people request and what google's vision is are two different things.
Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff. Yes sure, for free-tier stuff, I'm
sure lots of kids playing around with PHP would love to have a sand-box to
play around. But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that
signaled a move toward enterprise sales.

Also, it feels like one side of google is not talking with the other side.
They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive
to work with google apps, etc. Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow
further application development and integration.

To be honest, this feels like: _Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need
to have something to show_ than a vision of providing cloud-based computing
solution that fits within their big vision.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Also what people request and what google's vision is are two different
> things.

Google's vision is "developers deploying scalable apps on App Engine". Being
developer-friendly is good for that.

> Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff.

Existing PHP devs. Which is a lot of devs.

> Yes sure, for free-tier stuff, I'm sure lots of kids playing around with PHP
> would love to have a sand-box to play around.

Lots of apps that end up making money use PHP.

> But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that signaled a
> move toward enterprise sales.

Enterprise is an area that Google would like to get their Cloud Platform,
including App Engine, more sales in, but its never been anywhere close to
their sole target for it.

> They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive
> to work with google apps, etc.

"Building"? Apps Script has been around a long time (longer than Drive itself;
maybe longer than App Engine.)

> Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow further application
> development and integration.

Javascript on GAE would make a lot of sense, too (especially in light of App
Script and Google's work on V8 and the emerging popularity of Node.) So would
Dart-on-GAE. I wouldn't be surprised if either (or both) of those happened.
But the fact that it makes sense doesn't make PHP make any less sense.

> To be honest, this feels like: Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need
> to have something to show

App Engine PHP wasn't even the big Cloud Platform announcement tied to I/O;
general availability of the Compute Engine IaaS (and the associated new
pricing and instance types for Clound Engine) was the big Cloud Platform news.

> than a vision of providing cloud-based computing solution that fits within
> their big vision.

Google's big vision for cloud-based computing is, well, _big_. It includes
more than one kind of solution, for more than one market segment.

------
amish
To all the PHP haters. Feel free to bask in the glory of knowing pointers and
monads like the back of your hand, and leave making useful apps and making
money to PHP developers. That's fine with me :)

------
arunabha
Google Compute Engine - now available for everyone *

* Till its gets some traction, whereupon we will either jack up prices by 100% or more, or till some bigshot at Google kills it saying its not 'strategically aligned'.

~~~
salimmadjd
100% try 500-1000%

~~~
petersmagnusson
The "they will hike prices 10x when it's popular" meme is pretty tiresome.

I tried to address it back at the time, I invite you to read my thoughts
again:
[https://plus.sandbox.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/...](https://plus.sandbox.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/AA3sBWG92gu)
and happy to debate again. But please read it first.

GAE at the time was running as an experimental/beta product. There was no
support, there was no SLA, and there was no deprecation policy. When a product
is experimental or beta, eventually the time comes around when we need to look
at next steps.

We concluded that the pricing was insanely low at the time and did not make
for a viable long-term product. And when we talked to customers, they
absolutely didn't want us to discontinue the product, but instead they wanted
us to invest in it and provide support.

So that's what we decided to do. In working with customers, we determined that
(after reasonable optimizations), the vast majority of apps would experience
2-5x increase in bills. Obviously we lost some customers because of this, but
much fewer than you think, and mostly (but not always) because they were
simply architected in ways that badly matched GAE, or had business models that
assumed a cost-of-operations that was unrealistic (either on GAE or anywhere
else), and that we had in effect been subsidizing.

GAE targets being the "best" option, including cost - but you need to include
the entire cost, and factor in ease of use, SRE operations, durability,
scalability, etc. We're happy to duke it out with any apples-to-apples
comparison for total cost of ownership.

~~~
enneff
A working URL:
[https://plus.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/AA3sBWG9...](https://plus.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/AA3sBWG92gu)

------
staunch
And now we know why Guido left to join Dropbox ;-)

~~~
crncosta
LoL++

------
quackerhacker
I like PHP! It's the first OO programing that I learned and paved the way for
me learning C, C#, Obj-C...and now I'm studying Java. If it wasn't for Php's
loose declarations (as compared to C) than I would have had a harder time to
grasp object oriented programming and would've never made it past javascript.

------
paulyg
Why does every PHP thread turn into a bashing session? It's not constructive
to the conversation. I for one am excited about this. I'm only half way
through the docs buy so far I like what I see compared to other PHP PaaS.
Except no mbstring.

~~~
xlevus
Have you tried mb_string?

------
melvinmt
Does anyone know when Go 1.1 is available on App Engine?

~~~
dsymonds
It'll arrive in the next release or two.

------
adambard
I cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this
comprehensive article: [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-
bad-de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

An excerpt:

> I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh,
> a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

> You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed
> things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in
> handy sometimes.

> You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both
> sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle
> of the head holding it sideways.

> You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s
> flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough,
> so whatever.

> And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe
> not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem
> with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

> Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you
> “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used
> and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built,
> where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on
> the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for
> breaking their door.

> That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

~~~
vecinu
This has been reiterated over and over again and is just a bunch of fluff. It
doesn't explain why PHP is bad with examples and while I know there are a ton
of sites that do, many people including myself have used PHP successfully in
the past.

I will refer you to an even better quote: 'Software engineers are becoming
like "photographers". They spend so much time arguing over the right lens
type, focal length, camera body, flash and other sets of tools until they
discover they've already missed their opportunity at taking some great shots.
Software devs are now doing the same thing, arguing over the tools they use,
wasting precious time instead of getting work done.'

~~~
jrheard
> It doesn't explain why PHP is bad with examples

The linked article specifically does explain why PHP is bad, and it does it by
providing literally hundreds of specific examples. It's a really impressive
essay.

~~~
Osiris
The very first example about @fopen is full of weird stuff about INI file
changes and stuff that are not on by default and if someone turns them on they
should understand what they are doing.

------
eevee
I wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a
new PHP application from scratch _for_ GAE, or just people who want to install
Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of
deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else.

I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and
nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole section on templating with
an example autoescaping setup using Jinja2.

~~~
TheHydroImpulse
PHP as just started to get a package community going (Composer) but it's
incredibly slow. Using external packages in PHP isn't as easy as with other
platforms.

~~~
eevee
Surely Google could just preinstall something. The Python templating docs say
GAE includes both Jinja2 and the Django template engine.

------
anuraj
Learn to write code - languages won't matter then. A spade is a spade whatever
it is made of.

------
i_am_good
I can't seem to find the registration form, how does one get started?

~~~
zafirk
I'm Zafir, I work on the Cloud Platform team. Compute Engine will be available
tonight, so please check back in a few hours.

~~~
i_am_good
Awesome, thanks!

------
ereckers
There goes the neighborhood.

------
papsosouid
I know there's google people floating around HN, does anyone know what the
priorities are like as far as adding more services is concerned? I've been
planning on launching on AWS, but I'd prefer google. But there's still tons of
services google doesn't offer (or I can't find reference to at least). It is
basically just alternatives to EC2, S3 and the database thing right now right?
Are there plans for replacements for SQS, SNS, SES, route53, cloudwatch, etc?

~~~
namityadav
When it comes to my (virtual) infrastructure, I want to go with a platform
that's stable (including in terms of price), well-tested by others who have
similar needs as me, and has a lot of documentation / articles / questions
online. And I would never go with a platform that doesn't have all other
services that I may need (as you mentioned). Why wait for google replacing SES
when you can just go with AWS? MHO, obviously!

~~~
tkw8
GCE seems like another "me too" product. The PaaS thing didn't work out so
well for Google or Microsoft. When they realised AWS was much more popular
with IaaS they simply set about copying AWS. They are years behind AWS and by
the time they catch up with what AWS has today the world would have moved on
to bigger and better features.

So many new "me too" clouds, Azure, Rackspace, HP, even Oracle, and now
Google.

