You know you’ve missed the boat on Cloud Computing when the federal government opens its own App Store for cloud computing solutions before you ever even try the technology. Everyone knows the Federal Government will always be the last to adopt new ideas. Maybe not this time thought because they sure beat a bunch of us to the cloud.
I’ve been following Amazon Web Services for several years now, fully intending to dive in to discover the benefits of the cloud. At first the offerings were confusing and complex. More recently, the services and the utilities that support their use have matured and are reasonably approachable. I still haven’t dived in to those waters though. I suspect this isn’t a solution for putting together small web sites.
Joyent has quite a history in the cloud computing arena. They offer Accelerator accounts, their fundamental cloud building block, utilizing Joyent’s custom distribution of OpenSolaris and other Linux/BSD goodies. They also offer more traditional shared hosting at an attractive price point.
Google’s App Engine offers a cloud computing solution for the small scale DIY publisher at a price point that’s hard to beat: $zero. Like all the solutions mentioned here, there is a learning curve involved. The App Engine SDK comes in two basic flavors, Python and Java. If your like me, you may not know much about either of these programming environments, but don’t let that discourage you. If your project is modest, you may be able to get by with a little knowledge and a bit of reading.
The Python SDK and the Getting Started Guide may be the best starting point. If your a novice with Web publishing technologies, you really do need to go thought this guide. if you can master this step then you probably can figure out how to publish your modest site on App Engine.
The good news is that the Python SDK version 1.2.5 and beyond includes the App Engine Launcher for Windows. Earlier versions of the SDK required using the DOS command shell which made it far more complicated to get started. There’s an Eclipse plug-in, but if you could use Eclipse, you wouldn’t be here reading this article. The App Engine Launcher is a modest Windows application that vastly simplifies the process of creating and publishing using App Engine.
App Engine Launcher and a simple text editor are all you need to get started. Try it out and see how far you get. Can’t make it work, cut your losses, life is too short. On the other hand if you can slug it out through the tutorial, you have hit the cloud hosting jackpot because the first 5 million page views per month are free. Way more than several small web sites will ever use. Read up and check it out yourself. I will post an article here showing how to publishing a simple template-based web site soon. Check back.
