This is a guest post written by Waleed Abdulla, a software engineer and the founder and CEO of Ninua, Inc. You can follow his projects on his blog at selfdebugging.com.

At a technical meetup in Santa Clara a few days ago, I met Dave Westwood, a talented developer and 3D engineer who told me a fascinating story about the phenomenal growth of his recent application, BuddyPoke, which witnessed an explosive surge in traffic when Google released their Orkut platform to their Brazilian users on July 10. It was the kind of sudden growth that crashes servers and kills Web sites. Unless, of course, they’re hosted on a vastly scalable infrastructure that automatically adapts to handle what you throw at it; such as the Google App Engine. I’ll let Dave tell the story:

BuddyPoke is live on myspace.com, hi5.com and orkut.com. It has had the most success on Orkut, and is currently the number 2 application in Brazil. Orkut took 25% of their Brazilian users live on July 10th and went live to the remaining 75% of Brazilian users on July 15th. In the last eight days the rate of new installs per hour for BuddyPoke has grown by a factor of eight on Orkut, with sharp jumps on those two days. 500,000 avatars were personalized today (although some of them may be by the same user). The ability to grow rapidly and handle sudden jumps in traffic is all thanks to App Engine’s ability to scale so fluidly. And while all of this growth happened we were working on our next update, not frantically phoning up a hosting company to add servers.

The Google App Engine (GAE), which is still in preview release, offers a free hosting quota that’s enough to serve approximately 5 million pages a month. Dave had to call a Google product manager at 3:00AM to ask for a much needed quota increase. Google obliged and opened the flood gates for him.


Free Hosting for Blogs and Small Websites

google-app-engineThe allure of automatic scaling is not the only thing that GAE offers. Imagine that you’re starting a new blog and you want to have the full flexibility to install any plugin you like. The available free options, such as WordPress.com and Blogger, won’t do it for you because they restrict what you can install on the server. So you end up having to host it yourself and pay hosting fees.

But new open-source initiatives, like Bill Katz’s Bloog, which is an open source blogging platform written specifically for the App Engine, will let you host your blog for free on Google’s infrastructure. You pay only if you exceed 5M monthly page views. Sure, Bloog is still at an early stage and doesn’t have the wealth of plugins that established platforms have, but it’s a sign of where things are headed. Not only blogs, but soon we might see open-source products that allow us to create simple personal or business Web sites and host them for free without giving up the freedom to customize them beyond the options offered out of the box. This might be a threat to companies that offer limited versions of their blogging or personal site design products for free in the hope of getting customers to pay for advanced features later.

Globally Distributed Infrastructure at Your Fingertips

There is more to hosting than having servers that scale well. Distance matters. The closer your server is to your customers, the faster your pages load. On the App Engine, if your customers happen to be in Brazil, your application will automatically be moved to a server closer to where the demand is. Or it might be replicated on many servers in different parts of the world. All automatically. Before the App Engine, such infrastructure was only available to big companies with deep pockets. But now, individual developers, like Zaid Abdulla, can build services like BitPixels, a service to generate Website thumbnails, and offer Google-fast downloads from any part of the world, in one day. (disclaimer: Zaid is the author’s brother).

Where do we Go from Here?

The above examples are not unique. Already, startups are starting to utilize the new platform. Some do it because it’s a new cutting-edge technology, and others to use the free hosting and automatic scaling. Other interesting examples include TweetWheel which tells you which of your Twitter friends know each other, Jumbra which merges multiple RSS feeds into one, and Mobaganda which helps you create events online. And there are many more.

tweetwheel-screen

Obviously, if GAE takes off it puts Google in control of a big and critical part of the Web infrastructure. Not only will it bring revenues from hosting fees, but it’ll also make it easier for Google to buy startups and integrate their code rather than having to rewrite most of it like they do today.

So here is the big question: will companies trust Google enough to host their applications? My guess: a few will jump at it right away, and others will hesitate for a while, but eventually sign up. Startups and open source projects will probably lead the way because they love to be on the cutting edge, they don’t have much to lose, and they need any leverage they can get. After a few successes start making headlines, more and more companies will consider GAE seriously, at least for their less sensitive applications that could use easy and reliable scaling. GAE is definitely a great option to have and it’ll be very interesting to watch how the landscape unfolds.

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