

Open Source Google App Engine Clone - frankhamlin
https://github.com/AppScale/appscale

======
martin_
Any plans to support PHP? It seems to be the only missing engine before being
a complete clone

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

~~~
nlake44
Author of AppScale here. We have php support on our road map. I suspect its
about one to two sprints out.

~~~
rbanffy
I submitted a presentation proposal about AppScale for this year's
PythonBrasil (no word yet on whether it was approved). Is there anything in
special I should highlight?

~~~
nlake44
Drop me an email at raj@appscale.com and we can discuss all the recent
features we've added. One service we're able to provide because of AppScale's
API is disaster recovery for GAE applications. We presented it recently at
Gigaom's Structure conference: [http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-
CO-20130620-908833.html](http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-
CO-20130620-908833.html)

------
richardw
I'd love a no-fidget version of GAE, where the underlying infrastructure
wasn't 'upgraded' constantly, or at least was done on a very careful schedule.
A good portion of issue mails from Google are 'we upgraded something and broke
these things. btw, we care about reliability.'

A project like this might encourage a hosting company to take that on. One
disadvantage with Google is that your app can be affected by very many layers
of goodness, including leaky abstractions that have nothing to do with GAE on
the surface. Like when they blocked some Cloudflare somewhere down the stack
and various Google sites were affected, including GAE and Blogger.

------
ShaneCurran_
It's sponsored by Google (check the footer of README.md)

~~~
nikcub
They need something to assure enterprise customers hosting with them
(especially as Google are trigger happy with killing products). A lot of
companies with enterprise clients will place their code into escrow,
supporting an open alternative is better.

------
moondowner
Nice! A complete clone of GAE is really handy to be able to use in some cases.

Note that you can also run Java GAE apps on JBoss AS or OpenShift with
CapeDwarf: [https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf](https://www.jboss.org/capedwarf)

------
newtexan
I've been working on porting an existing python based AE project to AS and so
far so good. My companies' reasoning for putting time and resources into
AppScale is for redundancy. AE is a great platform to develop for however it's
not a 5 9s platform that's for sure.

------
niggatitus
Does anyone have any experience with this project?

~~~
frankhamlin
I tried it out on VirtualBox for some GAE apps I have. It was pretty easy to
get going and the apps ran perfectly.

------
jaytaylor
This looks very similar to the ShipBuilder PaaS written in Go
([https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder](https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder)).
I am excited to see all these open source PaaS systems beginning to emerge and
mature. These all help to foster and sustain an environment which makes
creating and hosting large-scale applications easier for developers. A
considerable and big win in the OSS world if you ask me!

------
jagan123
Appengine is already cheap and reliable. Why would anyone want it on other
cloud providers?

~~~
rbanffy
In addition to the others mentioned, regulatory issues come to mind. The
company I work for hosts applications we are not allowed to host on servers we
do not control.

~~~
nl
To quote the question "Why would anyone want it on other _cloud providers_ "

You can't use AppEngine _or_ any other cloud provider, unless you start
playing semantic games around what "servers we do not control" means.

------
SEJeff
Could this be due to GAE not getting as much traction as google had hoped?

~~~
RyanZAG
Probably not, AppScale has been around for years now.

GAE's main customer is Google itself as far as I know, so I don't think they
have any problems with traction. They certainty aren't priced or have the
features necessary to get much traction outside Google at any rate.

They're a premium service with very harsh restrictions and poor portability. I
gave them a try for awhile, but ultimately they have too many drawbacks and
have been plagued with terrible issues such as 20sec+ start up times on
GAE/Java. It's just not a great option considering you can get the same
performance as ~50 GAE instances with a single dedicated host at 2-4 order of
magnitude less cost.

AppScale itself is pretty interesting though, but without the Google Bigtable
backend, most of the forced restrictions don't make much sense and actually
decrease performance and reliability compared to just developing for a linux
VM directly.

~~~
unz
Not to get argumentative, but I often come across people trashing app engine
and I just don't get it. I think it's absolutely great and how software
development should be done,

They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you
start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it
can't be used.

And it's about as cheap as you could make something like that, If google
itself finds it valuable, that's a argument in favor, not against, google
having some of the best software developers around.

The only limitation currently is it doesn't have postgresql.

(I don't have anything to do with google. I just wish more people used it so
more features could be added, and more open source software written for it,
and I'd benefit from that).

~~~
tlarkworthy
I also love GAE. ITS FREE, for sizeable usage (if you profile your DB). It
does push and pull via channel API. SSH configuration is easy as it gets.

I have not really had a problem with speed. I have a game on it that does
400ms client -> sever -> client.(authentication done in parallel thread) You
can put Django on it. ITS FREE!

~~~
arvin
I also love Google App Engine. I have a paid iOS app that uses GAE, and so far
I get by with the free plan.

------
jwheeler79
AppScale are notorious for spamming the official GAE mailing list, and for
that reason alone, I'd be cautious dealing with them

~~~
rbanffy
I'm looking at the google-appengine group and there are three messages with
the word "appscale" in them since June. Am I looking into the wrong list?

