Cloud Foundry vs Google App Engine

By Tanmay Deshpande	Article Rating:
May 1, 2012 07:45 AM EDT	Reads:	7,467

Related
Print
Email
Feedback
Add This
Blog This

PaaS is nothing but uploading your small kernel of code with business logic and the PaaS service provider will run that code on allocated computing and storage instances. The aim of PaaS is to let the developers concentrate on developing their code rather than creating and maintaining their ecosystem required for it. When Google launched App Engine in 2008 it had very basic functionalities but gradually it has evolved to support much good functionality like Channel APIs. But when it comes to language support, selection of cloud, selection of database, control over database, Cloud foundry gives great amount of flexibility as compared to App Engine. Also, when it comes to supporting Java packages also, Google App Engine doesn’t allow developers to free their arms as there are quite a few important packages which are still not part of App Engine’s white list.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

It’s been a year now that Cloud Foundry has been launched. Making it Open Source was a masterstroke from VMware. When it entered in April, it was supporting Java Spring, Ruby on Rails and Node.js but now it has expanded its capacity to support PHP, .NET, Perl, Erlang, Scala and Clojure. Like this we can compare Google App Engine and Cloud Foundry in various aspects and depending on specifications, one should choose the best suited for his/her requirement.

Here is a matrix of comparative study between Google App Engine and Cloud Foundry.

Dimension	Google App Engine	CloudFoundry.com
Supported Languages/ Frameworks	Java and Python	Spring , Ruby Framework Rails & Sinatra , Node.js, PHP, .NET, Perl, Erlang, Scala and Clojure
Requirement of Specific SDK.	Yes –appengine-sdk	No.
Selection of Database	Cannot select. As its Big Table Database by default.	Yes. Options:- MongoDB, MySQL
Monitoring	• Has a separate dashboard to monitor the application. • Detailed monitoring is provided. • Can monitor all apps uploaded through same account at a time through common dashboard.	• Monitoring is provided within development IDE only. e.g. STS / Eclipse • Monitoring is not that detailed.
Billing	Detailed billing info.is available.	Billing details are yet to be provided as still in beta version.
Account	Any Google Account.	Need to register yourself at cloudfoundry.com
Application Name / URL	You can specify the desired unmatched name for the application. And the URL will be : example.appspot.com	Here your project in IDE will appear as name to be deployed. And the URL will be: example.cloudfoundry.com
No. of Apps per Account	10	Not Specified
Not supported Java features	• Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) • JAX-RPC • JAX-WS • Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) • Java EE™ Connector Architecture (JCA) • Java Management Extensions (JMX) • Java Message Service (JMS) • Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) • Remote Method Invocation (RMI)	Info NA.
Versioning	Supported	Not supported. (Cannot keep track of all deployed versions as of now)
Unit testing on local machine	Supports as it creates Actual like environment on localhost	Supported on local machine
Migration of already existing application	Not supported.	Supported but not in beta version
Disabling of Application	Possible from Dashboard	Possible form IDE.
Is an open source?	No	Yes.
Vendor Lock-In	Yes	NO
Cloud Lock-In	Yes	NO
Serialization of Session for each request	Yes	Not necessary
Private Cloud or Multi-Cloud Facility	Only Public cloud	NO

Related
Print
Email
Feedback
Add This
Blog This

Cloud Foundry vs Google App Engine

More Stories By Tanmay Deshpande

Cloud Expo