RSSGoogle Apps hacked to run on Amazon Web Services
By Ed Oswald | Published April 15, 2008, 1:10 PM
A developer has found a way to host Google Apps on Amazon's Web services platform, and is open sourcing his solution.
When Google released App Engine, some saw it as a way to lock in applications created within Google Apps from being transferred to to any other Web services provider. This would essentially diminish the attractiveness of start-ups from an acquisition perspective, analysts said, for anyone other than Google, or those who may not mind allowing Google to continue hosting its data.
Amazon's Web services layer on the other hand makes moving apps off its service much easier. Thus a service that allows Google apps to be hosted somewhere else other than with Google could be attractive to some.
That's where AppDrop.com comes in. While it does not currently have a lot of security, nor is it built to scale or support large applications, it is a start. With its code open-sourced, its likely these issues will be addressed, and other hosting sites would become available.
"I don't think Amazon has anything to worry about here. The slice of the pie that needs to run 25-machine Hadoop jobs is getting bigger all the time," developer Chris Anderson said. "Until Google provides open access to their real compute cluster, I don't see a threat to that."
Right now AppDrop only supports Python, and its Web site says that it is only a "proof of concept" at this point.
An alternative to hacking the libs is the Google App Engine Elastic Server (http://es.cohesiveft.com/site/google-appengine) that can be deployed to EC2.
(Google ported to Amazon? that's just silly... The Google App Engine Elastic Server just makes it easy to develop and test on vmware, xen, parallels, or Amazon EC2)
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Guys, stop using the word Hack for everything.
AppDrop is a proof-of-concept, to show that Google's App Engine platform can be ported to other hosts.
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"A developer has found a way to host Google Apps on Amazon's Web services platform, and is open sourcing his solution."
Finding a way to use a product in a manner in which it was not designed is a hack. The word 'hack' has been woefully misused in the media, but it is correct in this context.
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