Murphy Bytes

Recently, my friend Josh got me interested in Google Application Engine. I’ve been building distributed applications for a number of years now and have always assumed that if I were deploying to a cloud platform, it would be on EC2 because of choice of operating systems, and support for environments that I know well like Rails. GAE doesn’t support the same environments (at least not out of the box). It also abstracts the OS away from you almost entirely. That is the reason that I think GAE is better. I like the idea of not dealing with the OS at all. OS is complicated. To do a Unix application right you need to understand shell scripting, daemons and security. I usually like to set up a user with limited privileges for my applications to run under (no login, limited file system access, etc.) I also like to have a group for users who can admin the application and another group for a more limited set of users who can admin the machine. This of course implies that you set up sudoers correctly so an application admin can start the application as root (the app is then demoted to run as a user with limited privileges after it’s gotten access to all resources it needs to run). And of course you need to be cognizant of things you want the application administrators to have access to like read access to /var/logs. Anyway, it’s complicated to get right. GAE abstracts the OS away from you so you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff which is a good thing. You just focus on the application logic and let Google worry about the OS which is a big win in my opinion.