I am using Google App Engine for some time already, spent long time testing with small applications for my company, and even started a simple open-source library called Jobtracker, running on it, that helps tracking development costs through managing resource work time. With this one year of experience so far I can say that this is still an early stage of what is to come in the future of cloud computing, but I have high expectations (regardless the company).
Nevertheless, I still has my doubts on using such service for business purposes, as its reliability depends entirely on third-parties. Google has always tried, amazingly, to provide high-quality services with no cost to its customers, such as Gmail and even Google Apps, which are both very stable and mature. Even though the paid versions are guaranteed with a 99.9% SLA of uptime, I am most sure the actual number is much higher even for the free versions. Good for us, kudos for them.
Back to the real world...
The reality for Google App Engine, however, is not just there yet. I asked before directly to Google personnel about their expected SLA and current one, with no luck, so I decided to do a small investigation on their outages (openly reported here) and roughly estimate its value. You know, being a representative of such service and trying to push my own company to use it, I need data (I meant numbers) to prove it. So, here are my findings, considering one year up to now:
About 9 incidents in one year and a uptime SLA of 99.75%.
Note: Not all incidents represented completed service outage, instead they are mere rough values to measure the overall system stability, and may differ from an official source, that can analyze with care partial disruptions and present more valuable data for us customers.
Last thoughts
Of course we can not take this too hard on Google App Engine, considering it is a service free of charge, with lots of features, tools, documentation, etc. that can guide you or anyone (even without proper knowledge of python, django, MVC, XMPP, etc) to build simple applications in the cloud without any expenses rather than your own brain. This is already an achievement, and I am sure the service (which is growing rapidly) will only get better from this moment on.
The more reliable it gets, the higher are the chances companies and even people may find it as a trusted in-cloud solution to place their businesses or ideas, guaranteed that they can sleep at night without customer complaints or disappointments.
After all, the cloud and Google App Engine is what this is all about: ultra-redundant failure-proof solutions (at least at our end, as we don't have to worry about infrastructure, hardware, software, etc).
Monday, March 8, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Video Screen Capture
Today, while reporting a simple (but still stupid) bug in Gmail here, I had to create a video to reproduce the error as I experience in my machine, so I took a look at the screen capture applications available for linux.
Among the options, although command-line based, RecordMyDesktop was the one I used. To have it with a proper GUI would help, but you can manage to do whatever you need just by reading the help available.
Note: I added some extra options (didn't want to capture the entire desktop).
And you may see the result in Youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBBwEaA-MJ0
Nice and easy!
Among the options, although command-line based, RecordMyDesktop was the one I used. To have it with a proper GUI would help, but you can manage to do whatever you need just by reading the help available.
recordmydesktop --no-sound -y 75 -width 800 -height 600
Note: I added some extra options (didn't want to capture the entire desktop).
ffmpeg -i out.ogv out.flv
And you may see the result in Youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBBwEaA-MJ0
Nice and easy!
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