When App Engine was first introduced, almost a year ago to the day, it stuck with Python, a favorite among code-happy Google Oompa Loompas. But after countless request from developers outside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, the platform has now embraced Java as well.

“We wanted to give developers something that they could be ecstatic about, but we knew we would have to marry the simplicity of Google App Engine with the power and flexibility of the Java platform,” Google engineers Don Schwarz and Toby Reyelts wrote in this evening’s post to the official App Engine Blog. “We also wanted to leverage the App Engine infrastructure - and by extension Google’s infrastructure - as much as possible, without giving up compatibility with existing Java standards and tools.

“And so that’s what we did. App Engine now supports the standards that make Java tooling great.”

According to Cnet, the service’s new incarnation runs version 1.6 of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). So, in theory, it can also handle code written in such languages as Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

With that Google opens up a new world of possibilities. Java either partially or totally is a component of so many common tools. That lack of support on GAE has been an issue for many with GAE as a python only platform. One should expect to see a new bevy of applications show up on GAE as a consequence.

There is one other plus out of this. GAE can now give AWS some competition. As Google rounds out the support matrix of other languages we can expect a minor price war to be engaged between the two. Can’t wait.

On a GAE related note, be advised that GAE now has a Cron module available for use. Details here on the Google Labs site.

Linky.

Whether you’re a developer or someone who employs one, Twilio can add VoIP to your site or your internal nets.  How it interacts with whom and where is limited only by your imagination. The company offers a 1000 minute free trial for you to test it’s API based service.

We’re always building web applications, and sometimes we want those apps to be able to interact with phone callers. Maybe we want a customer to be able to call in and get information, or maybe we need to coordinate our employees more efficiently. Before Twilio, you would have had to learn some foreign telecom programming languages, or set up an entire stack of PBX software to do this. At which point, you’d say “aw, forget it!” Twilio lets you use your existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve these problems quickly and reliably. We provide the infrastructure, you provide the business logic via HTTP, (twilio)

As an interesting side note, Twilio is built for and runs on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure (link).

For a little more than the last three quarters, GAE has been a free but constrained service. Well no more. Google has announced pricing finally and also some adjustments to the free band of service. –

• $0.10 per CPU core hour (This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage).
• $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing. (This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API).
• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.
• $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

The affects on the free band —

With a Tuesday afternoon blog post, App Engine Googler Brett Slatkin said that developers can now set their own daily budgets for processing power, bandwidth, storage, and email spewing. Google will then give you as many resources as your app needs - up to those limits. But you’re only charged you for what you use beyond App Engine’s no-charge quotas.

The rub is that the free CPU and bandwidth quotas are going down. “Along with many performance improvements over the past ten months, we’ve learned that we overestimated our initial free quota values,” Slatkin said. In 90 days, free usage will top out at 6.5 hours of CPU time per day and a mere gigabyte of data transfers. But Slatkin and the App Engine team are confident these limits can still handle 5 million page views a month.

To lessen the blow, Google has increased the free storage limit a GB. And the free email limit remains at 2,000 recipients.

The pricing is a close match to AWS. However AWS has a slight advantage. Last quarter AWS announced a rate breakout that decouples the transport tier away from the supplier to the customer. There are advantages to this type of offering from a service billing perspective from the suppliers point of view.

Even with the decrease in the free band it is still quite a bit of service for zero cost. Is there a clear winner here in the cloud space. Well if you just consider the cloud service aspect I would still tip the hat to AWS. They have a longer track record and their offerings have developed some excellent tools both internal and third party through the community. That’s to GAE’s disadvantage. But if you look further out, if Google starts providing easy hooks into GAE from their other services (Sites, Alerts, Docs) then there might be a stronger tale to tell.

Linky

Well the next version of Ubuntu is to be named Karmic Koala according to Shuttleworth. Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is to be released in April and an Alpha release is available for the intrepid souls out there.

But the most important item for the Koala release will be a heavy integration of the OS in support of Cloud Services. Here’s the pitch from Shuttleworth –

A good Koala knows how to see the wood for the trees, even when her head is in the clouds. Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools. We’re currently in beta with official Ubuntu base AMI’s for use on Amazon EC2. During the Karmic cycle we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image. Ubuntu-vmbuilder makes it easy to create a custom AMI today, but a portfolio of standard image profiles will allow easier collaboration between people doing similar things on EC2. Wouldn’t it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?

What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala’s favorite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware. It’s no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty - during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs. A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there’s work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there’s nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market.

A tad too spritzy? Well that’s Ubuntu when it comes to marketing and press releases. But it boils down to two things:

• Koala will have an active toolset for the design and construction of AMI’s on the AWS EC2 infrastructure. That’s native to the server core.
• Koala will also allow you, the sys admin, if it is desired build your own cloud infrastructure using the Eucalyptus system. Eucalyptus is gaining favor with many in the FOSS community for its good performance and maintainability.

Does this signal a different direction for Ubuntu? Compared to say Red Hat and SuSe I would say so^. When I look at the marketplace Red Hat and SuSe seem to be stongly focused on the Virtualization space. Or providing AMI’s for the AWS space. Canonical plays in this space as well with KVM and VMWare support. But native cloud support is a clear departure from their competitors. At a minimum Canonical is ratching up the cloud wars.

Many an IT pundit is suggesting that cloud computing will be the demise of standalone compute environments and FOSS based ones in particular. The reality might very well be quite different. When the tools are such that even a oaf like myself can set up their own cloud environment then the tables turn. There are industries that due to regulatory concerns need to keep data private. They will internalize these tools to their benefit. The other is hardware is getting cheaper all the time. I don’t have to buy an HP DL585 to get good graphics rendering peformance. I could just as well buy 4 soon to be cheap quadcores and cloud the whole thing. Folks like Google and Amazon will generally have the economic upper hand due to economies of scale. But the stand alone cloud environment has a winning chance as the tools improve.

Linky

^ Both vendors inter operate on AWS as an (pre)configurable AMI. Different from what I see Canonical attempting.

Amazon marches forward with its AWS cloud. This time it is a management console addition to the line up. No longer will you have to manage your EC2 instances through the command line only. –

Access and manage Amazon’s growing suite of infrastructure web services through our new point-and-click, web-based user interface. The AWS Management Console gives you a quick, global picture of your cloud computing environment so that you can see what resources you’re operating and conveniently manage those resources. The initial release of the AWS Management Console provides a graphical user interface for Amazon EC2, with additional Amazon infrastructure services scheduled to be added to the console in the coming months.

Details here.

In related AWS news, Amazon also announced a new lower priced tier for Cloudfront. From what I can make of the pricing it is targeted to the lower volume distributor who is serviing a specific regional market. Not a bad thing in reality.

If you are one of those folks who still use Yahoo Briefcase Service you might want to check for a different solution. Come March Yahoo is discontinuing the service. Lots of alternatives, just pick one….

A Yahoo! spokeswoman confirms the service will retire from this world on the last day of March. “[Briefcase] was launched nearly 10 years ago and usage has been significantly declining over the years,” she tells us. “Users outgrew the need for the service and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities, e.g. Yahoo! Mail and Flickr. Discontinuing the service allows us to focus our efforts on more broadly used products, in line with our commitment to deliver the best possible user experience.”

As that online death notice explains, users must remove their online files by March 30 or they will vanish forever. It shouldn’t take long to remove them. The Briefcase tops out at 30MB.

A fast alternative? Use Gmail and GSpace web tool. You can get 4-6Gb depending on where you served by Google. Quick easy and reasonably secure.

Linky.

Up to now if you developed a cloud app on the EC2-S3 platform you had to be very, very good at capacity planning to make sure your wholesale rate would permit you to make a profit retailing the service. The big problem — bandwidth management and assessment. The provider paid for the usage then cross billed the usage as part of their service offering. Well there is another way being offered by Amazon –

Amazon has introduced a new business model for its S3 web services called Requester Pays. Businesses using S3 can mark up data buckets so their transfer will be paid by data requesters instead of being paid by their owners as it is now. Used in conjunction with DevPay, the new model opens new business opportunities for companies willing to share their data with others.

Usually, an S3 bucket owner pays for its storage and transfer costs. That inhibits the businesses from opening up their data to others because they will have to pay every time the data is accessed and downloaded. The new business model, Requester Pays, will change the game. The bucket owner can decide if a bucket uses the new model, in which case the consumer accessing and transferring the data will have to pay for that service.

The bucket owner has to authenticate all requests coming for a Requester Pays bucket for Amazon to be able to charge the requesters. Furthermore, the requesters must add “x-amz-request-payer” in their GET/POST request to indicate they are aware of the paying procedure.

Essentially AWS is uncoupling the usage/transport and billing requester directly. The service provider then only bills for the service cost of their offering to the requestor. Good move? You bet. If you want to offer public data sets of things like census data, mortality tables, phone books, etc then this is the way to go. It eases the service providers task in developing a pricing model for what they offer to analyze those big tables.

The nice thing is the old model is still available. So designers can select which billing method is best suited to their platform model. What’s not to love?

Linky.

We have noted that the major server providers are all now in the ‘boxed data’ biz. I would like to flesh out some impacts this could have on the matter. There are going to be some entities that are not going to like this at all. –

Of course there are those that will also love this. Tax entities that have low rates and little revenue. Service employees who get a job where these data boxes are located. Truckers who ship them. Etc.

Its a new world. New ISP’s may be able to out compete established players with this new development.

The social network blog Pownce shall be closing its doors Dec. 15th. No word on whether the service will be carried forward by acquirer 6Apart. From the cofounder –

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

I think we will be seeing a lot of this in 2009 as weak teams and VC puppies are weaned.

Linky

A few big name server manufacturers are already delivering self contained server farms in a containers as a quick scaling option for their larger customers. With the growth of out sourced data centers and cloud computing, the shipping container yard could represent a future alternative for the data center and colocation facility. Derelict rail yards not only could provide low cost real estate, but since the rail is also often a conduit for fiber and power transmission, little investment would be required to connect and power up. Better yet, do it in a rural location where the labor costs are low, and vagrancy and vandalism are non-issues.

Compared to building, a top-tier data center that can cost $1,000 per square foot, setting up a container park could be done relatively cheaply — all is needed is a plot of land with the appropriate physical security, a power distribution plant, backup generators and abundant Internet connectivity. These items are available in metropolitan locations where server huggers and their employers congregate. While the containers themselves are self-contained, there should be no reason that multiple organizations and their server huggers could not share servers in a single container. After all, server huggers already share cabinets and cage space in data centers today. (GigaOm)