Things were so much simpler back in 2008. Remember the launch of the Google (News - Alert) App Engine? Application hosting used to be so much simpler.

“Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services.”

At the time Google App Engine was seen as “a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).”

The difference, as Tech Crunch noted in 2008, was that unlike Amazon Web Services’ (News - Alert) loosely coupled architecture, “which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers.”

Even then it was seen as a platform locker. “Existing projects will have to be ported or written from scratch, and those that rely on traditional relational databases will probably have difficulty making the transition,” remarked industry observer Clint Ecker. “Even more difficult would be transitioning your application to your own servers if you choose to leave Google's tender embrace.”

Industry observer Alex Martelli explained that,today, “Portability is guaranteed by the fact that Google has open-sourced all the parts of App Engine that live in front of the RPC layer, thus facilitating the work (which would happen anyway of course!) of third party like appcelerator and bdbdatastore that implement compatible environment running on different infrastructure -- you only need to stay on Google's systems if Google gives you better ROI for your apps, else can easily migrate them to alternative implementations.”

Google application hosting capabilities have come so far and in so little time...